Bit of a data hoarder but also a drive hoarder. I have about 20 HDD and 5 SSDs that I used for backing up data in the past without a real organized backup program.

These older HD may have been used with W7, W8.1 or Win 10. All pro versions and all with me as administrator.

I do have recent clones of C drives which I update every week so feel safe there.

However when I try to bulk move, erase, sync or duplicate find on these older HDs using GUI tools like explorer, free file sync I get “access denied need administrator privileges” message for many of the files and folders. I can access each of these one at a time by clicking on the admin OK tab but no bulk tools seem to work and bulk tools of course needed when dealing with 200GB+ 20K files+ amounts of data.

All I have found that seems to work is to move the files to a new HDD, delete partitions and full format the old drive and then can move the files/folders to the new drive and sometimes it works from there but some of the files must still have a tag from before because the problem still exists but not on as many files.

What am I missing? All files were saved with administrator privileges back in the day. Same admin name just different windows OS version. Anyway I can bulk clear whatever tag has been set on these files?