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I have two accounts on my computer. One has a password, the other doesn't. They both need access to the same files but I'd also like to keep these files backed up. I'm doing stenography and these are my personal dictionaries. They're going to change a lot over time and I'd like to have access to those changes from one account to the other.

I use the stenography account because it's a clean desktop which isn't cluttered with thousands of icons from all my other interests (game-dev, communications programs, etc). It's where I do transcription services for work.

What I need:

I do not want the other account having access to my home folder. It's not password protected so anyone could get into my stuff. I need a single folder, which is automatically backed up whenever changes are made (preferably in my dropbox folder), to be accessible to both accounts.

I've tried 777ing the folder and putting a link in the / directory of the hard drive. That didn't work.

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I would create a new group, add both user accounts to that group and then set the directory's group recursively to that one and give it the read and write permissions for all files, then finally set it up that all new files and folders are automatically owned by the new group:

sudo addgroup newgroup
sudo adduser user1 newgroup
sudo adduser user2 newgroup
sudo chgrp -R newgroup /path/to/shared/folder
sudo chmod -R g+rw /path/to/shared/folder
sudo find /path/to/shared/folder -type d -exec chmod g+s {} +

The commands above assume that your two user accounts are user1 and user2, the new common group will get named newgroup and that the location of your files to share between the accounts is /path/to/shared/folder. Alter those to fit your situation.

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  • This doesn't work anymore because new files don't inherit permissions appropriately. Sep 2, 2020 at 20:57

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