Question

I am working on small scale deployment system for our in-house software that manages backups of several kinds of data. Part of the task is to backup certain folders, and I would like to backup the ACLs applied to those folders so that on restore the files still work as expected.

Prototyping some code, I have tried using .NET’s built-in XmlSerializer but to no avail.

Here is the example code:

public static byte[] SerializeFileACL(string path)
{
    var acl = File.GetAccessControl(path, AccessControlSections.All);

    using (var ms = new MemoryStream())
    {
        _fileSerializer.Serialize(ms, acl);
        return ms.ToArray();
    }
}

However this returns the same 143 bytes no matter what file I try it on. Is there a good way of serializing ACLs using .NET facilities? What am I doing wrong?

P.S.: Yes, I am aware that ACLs may not be applicable to other computers. This is not an issue for this project.

Answer 1

You can simply call the NativeObjectSecurity.Persist method as described on MSDN to serialize this object. As one person mentioned the object does not contain a SerializableAttribute and thus you cannot serialize the object graph in the friendly way.