If you’ve ever tried to figure out your PC’s NTFS folder permissions with the standard Explorer tools then you’ll know it can take a while. The basic details are a few clicks away, even the advanced tools don’t tell you everything you need to know, and if you need to check several folders then you’ll have to right-click each one of them individually: very tedious.

Fortunately there is now an interesting alternative, though, in the NTFS Permissions Reporter.

The program can also be launched from Explorer by right-clicking a folder and selecting Report Permissions. But this can include and report on any subfolders, too, or you can manually specify a list of folders and then have them checked in a single operation.

Forget the usual Explorer hassles - see all your folder permissions in a couple of clicks

Once the NTFS Permissions Reporter has completed its scan then you’ll see a tree which you can browse, and clicking on any individual folder will accurately reveal the permissions for each of your user groups in considerable detail.

There’s also information which you won’t clearly get from the regular Windows dialogs, such as details on any folders which haven’t inherited their parent’s permissions

And you even get a table indicating any errors which the program encountered along the way (like trying to access folders when it doesn’t have the appropriate permissions, ironically).

Useful though this is, the commercial Standard Edition is significantly better as it supports filters. Rather than simply report every permission on and below the target folder, you can look only for directories which aren’t inheriting permissions, say; user accounts which don’t exist; accounts which have been explicitly assigned (or denied) permissions; accounts from certain domains, and more. It’s ideal for system administrators, who can purchase the program for $149 (a one-off, lifetime payment) at the developer’s site.

If you just want an easy and accurate way to review multiple NTFS permissions then the NTFS Permissions Reporter Free Edition is perfectly adequate, though – go try out a copy for yourself.