Cygwin and the unreadable files

I have a PC which has been upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 10. At some point during one of the upgrades, some accounts have been “upgraded”. It all looks seamless until you take a look with Cygwin, which I use to make some backups.

And herein lies the problem.

$ ls -l
d---r-xrwx+ 1 Unknown+User Unknown+Group       0 Apr  6  2014 '2007 Photos'
d---r-xrwx+ 1 Unknown+User Unknown+Group       0 Apr  6  2014 '2008 Photos'
d---r-xrwx+ 1 Unknown+User Unknown+Group       0 Apr 28  2014 '2009 Photos'
d---r-xrwx+ 1 Unknown+User Unknown+Group       0 Jun 12  2014 '2010 Photos'
drwxr-xrwx+ 1 Andy         None                0 Apr 28  2018 '2011 Photos'
d---r-xrwx+ 1 Unknown+User Unknown+Group       0 Nov 23  2014 '2012 Photos'
d---r-xrwx+ 1 Unknown+User Unknown+Group       0 Mar 23  2016 '2013 Photos'
d---r-xrwx+ 1 Unknown+User Unknown+Group       0 Dec 30  2014 '2014 Photos'
drwxr-xrwx+ 1 Andy         None                0 Jan 28 20:46 '2015 Photos'
drwxr-xrwx+ 1 Andy         None                0 Sep 24  2017 '2016 Photos'
drwxr-xrwx+ 1 Andy         None                0 Apr 28  2018 '2017 Photos'
drwxr-xrwx+ 1 Andy         None                0 Jan  9 16:58 '2018 Photos'
drwxr-xrwx+ 1 Andy         None                0 Jan  9 16:48 '2019 Photos'

All the above are really owned by user “Andy”, and have been since 2007, but somewhere along the line, maybe in a Win10 upgrade, they’be been re-owned by the operating system.

This is now a problem when I back up using a shell-script in Cygwin because I was using rsync

rsync -avz "${SOURCE_ROOT}/${DIR}/" "${REMOTE_USER}@${REMOTE_ADDR}:\"${DEST_ROOT}/${DIR}\""

This used to work, but now it doesn’t because the -a flag to rsync includes the instruction to
copy file permissions. which

A little look in the manual reminds me that -a is a combination of other
flags (-rlptgoD), and that includes the -p flag meaning “copy file permissions”. So
my rsync command now looks like this:

rsync -rltovz

I did also find a way of seeing these strange owners in Windows, but it was quite hidden: Right click on the folder in question and click “Properties”, then look in the “Sharing” tab:

Who’s that “Unknown Contact”? I suspect that’s actually the GUID of the original “Andy” account.

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