Permissons inheritance and SP Groups

Question

Sorry in advance for the basic question but today I had a long conversation with a vendor that made me doubt what I know
Say you have a site collection, it has 5 subsites and all inherit from the parent.
They have the default permisson groups
Site1 Owners
Site1 Members
Approvers
Site1 Visitors
At some point you get asked to break inheritance and give all sites unique permissons.
From now on all the subsites no longer inherit from Site1, so if I add a user or change anything on that site it wont push down to Subsite1
Now here the part where the confusion came in, if the Appovers group or any exisitng group that is on Subsite1 gets modified will the sites below it see a difference in the Aprrovers group, mythoughts are they will because the group is already there and
breaking inheritance doesnt make the assigned groups unique, they are still the same SP group.
thanks
themush

Answer 1

So one thing to keep in mind is that all SPGroups and Users are stored at the RootWeb level. Subwebs may or may not use those groups or contain those users.
That said, in your scenario, the subweb(s) would still be leveraging the RootWeb's groups (Site1 Owners, Site1 Members, Approvers...) until you manually removed them. If you created an alternate Approvers group and assigned it to the subweb, then yes you
would have to manage both Approvers groups by hand.
So yes, you're absolutely correct -- it is the same Approvers group when you break subweb inheritance.
Trevor Seward
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This post is my own opinion and does not necessarily reflect the opinion or view of Microsoft, its employees, or other MVPs.