Password protect Win XP folder/drive, but access by camera software?

Hello all, i manage a small network of camera's at my father in law's corner store. It's not connected to the internet so intrusive access is not a concern. However some of our employee's we believe are skipping their stocking and cleaning duties. I never password protected the system because i didn't believe i needed to, dumb me. However after seeing the state our store was in, dirty and badly in need of stock, i went to check our recordings to see what our employee's did yesterday only all the recordings, except for today's, were gone. Now the system is set to delete old recordings(month old data) to allow new recordings, but i've never seen it delete more than a day or two at a time so i have my suspicions.

Its running on windows XP and is a home built security system. How can i password protect the drive/recordings folder but still enable the security software to write to it? I see the option "encrypt files" when i right click the rec_data folder, but no password option so leads me to believe that system is flawed and only works when a different user tries to access it. I don't want multiple users in case the power goes out; it auto boots back up and continues recording, multiple users would halt that at the log in screen.

Any help and advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

You could start the recording software using an exclusive credentials . Basically you create a new user/group and run the application (as a service perhaps) with the credentials of that new user/group. After that, you just set the permissions for the folders in questions, so both the system and the new user/group would have all the necessary permissions to do what they need to to do, but the other users (who need to use and access the computer) would only have read permissions there.

If you are already using different credentials for the job, just disable simple file sharing in the folder option's and set the permissions accordingly.