I found myself recently in this exact situation and decided to use this as my first real attempt at building a full-fledged tool with PowerShell. You’re not allowed to spend any money so you’re stumped. You’ve found tools like the NTFS Permissions Reporter ( ) but quickly found this costs hundreds of dollars in order to produce any kind of intelligible report. You realize that trying to analyze this manually is simply impossible so you’re looking for some kind of tool to assist you.

You’ve now been tasked with cleaning this up. Oh and since there has been no proper governance of it over the years, inheritance is broken all over the place and permissions are assigned many levels deep with no rhyme or reason. Unfortunately for you, this folder contains literally tens of thousands of folders and hundreds of thousands of files. If you found this post via a search engine, you’ve likely received a ticket/request from some manager requesting an audit report of the permissions on an important share within your company.