Question about user profiles

Hi Andre Bunting,

The .V6 extension on your roaming profile folders is the standard naming convention used by modern operating systems like Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows Server 2025 to differentiate profile versions. The zero-byte size and access denial you are experiencing occur because Windows automatically applies strict NTFS permissions to newly generated roaming profiles, granting Full Control exclusively to the target user and the Local System account. Since your administrator account is not on the Access Control List, Windows Explorer is blocked from reading the directory contents to calculate the actual storage size. You can verify which profiles are actively registered to the system by checking the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList registry key.

To allow administrator access for future profiles, you must enable the Group Policy located at Computer Configuration, Administrative Templates, System, and User Profiles by turning on the setting to add the Administrators security group to roaming user profiles. For your existing folders like Ameilia.V6, you must carefully modify the permissions without permanently stripping the user of folder ownership. Taking ownership away from the user without properly restoring it can cause the User Profile Service to generate an Event ID 1521 access denied error during their next logon attempt. A safer approach to viewing the size and structure of existing folders is to execute a command line utility like dir or icacls.exe using a tool that runs under the Local System context, as that account inherently holds the required access rights.

Your enterprise backup software successfully processes these restricted directories because it does not rely on standard user-level NTFS permissions. Backup agents typically run directly as the Local System account or leverage the Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service combined with the SeBackupPrivilege user right. This architecture grants the software the ability to read the raw file data at the volume level, bypassing the standard Windows Explorer access checks entirely and ensuring user profiles are safely archived even when administrators cannot manually browse them.

Hope this answer brought you some useful information. If it did, please hit "accept answer". Should you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.

VP

The .V6 suffix on the profile folder name is expected. It is the roaming profile version used by newer Windows 10 builds and corresponding Windows Server versions. Each OS family uses its own profile version (for example, .V2, .V3, .V4, .V5, .V6) so that profiles are kept separate and compatible.

For example:

• Windows 10 uses \\<servername>\\<fileshare>\\<username>.V5
• Windows 10, version 1703 and version 1607 use \\<servername>\\<fileshare>\\<username>.V6

So a folder like Amelia.V6 is a normal roaming profile folder for that profile version.

Regarding size and access:

• Roaming profiles are stored on a file share, and NTFS permissions are typically set so that only the specific user and SYSTEM have access. This is why an administrator may see “0 bytes” or get an access denied message when checking the folder properties directly.
• The context provided does not include specific steps or tools for an administrator to enumerate profile sizes or adjust permissions for backup purposes.
• The context also does not describe how backup software should be configured to access these protected profile folders.

Because of that, no further supported guidance on viewing profile sizes or configuring backup access can be given from the available information.

References:

• Deploy roaming user profiles