Receiving this error when you try to use /SECFIX wit Robocopy as instructed by Microsoft in this document? Their syntax is incomplete. SECFIX appears to be intended for use in conjunction with /SEC, as described by Robocopy’s original developer, Kevin Allen.

Things have moved on a bit in the past 11 years, security-wise, so I changed the way things work in this area slightly for the version of Robocopy that ended up in Vista, in that if you specify /SECFIX on the command line, Robocopy will copy security for skipped files that exist in both the source and the target trees.

So, to maintain two trees in sync, including their security, using Vista’s Robocopy, you can use the following as your regular Robocopy command:

> ROBOCOPY ** /MIR /SEC /SECFIX**

/MIR will replicate data and security (as /SEC is specified) for changed files, and /SECFIX will update just the security for unchanged files. Add /V to the command line if you want to see which files are having their security “fixed” without having their data copied.

Read the full post by Kevin Allen here.

I just tried that command and it stopped barking at me. Permissions copied. Couldn’t find this solution provided to anyone else experiencing this problem so it seemed worth sharing.