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Unknow Contact in File Sharing

Steel Contributor

I have a folder that is shared across my network for my users, however, when I looked at it today, it showed an Unknown Contact. Any ideas?

6 Replies
Most probably this represents an unknown/deleted user. Maybe this folder was cut and pasted from another place which had this user, but your current location doesn't have it. For deleted AD users it would usually show a SID instead of this, but Google search seems to prove this point that this is some missing user.

@wroot 

 

Thanks for your reply! I do see a SID when I go into Advanced.

Then this is some missing user. If this folder didn't come from an outside, then this folder had a permission with a user, which is deleted in your domain. I sometimes saw this on our file server, although we tried to use groups instead of individual users for permissions as much as possible.

@wroot 

Yes, we use groups also instead of individual users for permissions. This might be tied to another issue I was having with user folders renaming to Documents. See this post:

 

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Windows-Server-for-IT-Pro/Active-Directory-User-Folders-Renam...

Well, this is some weird issue. Maybe you are using Terminal services/Remote desktop services and all user profiles are created on this server. But i can't say what could have caused such renaming of folders. I'm not 100% sure, but i think deleted group can also appear as a SID.

@wroot 

Yes it is a wierd issue. These screenshots are from our Domain Controller where all our users are created along with the shared folders.