Only MS verified programs can write to Documents when Ransomware protection is turned on. How you get to be verified is another question… It’s not directly related to code signing, I tried that. But you can explicitly trust a program, and then it can write to Documents (see the image in my previous message). That would be the way to do it if the user wanted to keep Ransomware protection turned on.
Windows security also keeps track of unauthorised attempts to write to Documents, and they’re shown in Protection history. You can allow the program by following the associated link
Yikes! I guess this ransomware protection thing is relatively new, otherwise we would have heard a lot about this before. And yeah, it sounds like Rack Windows users are going to be bitten hard by this, if they don’t know what’s going on. @Vortico definately needs to put this in the installation steps for Windows, until the situation might be sorted. But jeez… most people won’t know this is turned on by default, and will have no clue why their programs stop working.
This could cause issues for any program developer. The Documents folder, and Pictures, Videos, Music and Favourites are the usual place to store data for the user, and it has been the recommended practice for as long as those “special” places have existed. I’ll have to investigate this, hopefully before anything of mine gets blocked…
I turned it on in my windows. don’t know if it’s a good idea or not, but that’s another question.
From time to time I run an app, and it makes windows pop up the notice that it was blocked. Then if it seems legit (like VCV saving a patch) I allow that app, which is a one time thing.
Thanks for asking. It turns out that Jens’ suggestion to remove the read-only file protection on files within the Rack2 folder did resolve the issue (see above), both when trying to open files and creating new ones.
So, thanks to Jen for the clear and thorough help.
In my case, ransomware settings in Windows did not seem to have an effect (and I did explore those settings as Jens had suggested above). I can see how such settings might affect VCV Rack’s ability to write to selected folders.
Yes, but if you have the ransomware thing turned on IT will have made the files read-only, it didn’t happen by itself. So the core issue is the ransomware setting.
Well, you never answered whether it was turned on or not, and I’ll bet you that if it’s turned on, and you haven’t added Rack to its exclusion-list, it will happen again in the future, because it’ll set the files and directories read-only again. Setting the files read-write yourself is not the right solution methinks, turning off ransomware protection or at least excluding Rack from the list, is. But glad it’s working for you now, for the moment…
Anyway, I can confirm that Avast’s ransomware module was the culprit. No need to disable Avast completely, just the ransomware “feature.” This will fix the unarchiver issue, as well as issues with updating VCV and plugins.
