Sharing permission issues

Question

i'm a mac newbie.
I have external hardisks that I partitioned into different volumes to act as my backup for different media. For example, there's a volume for music, pictures, etc. Because these are backups, I don't want any user beside me to access these volumes. So I set sharing permission as the following:
Me - Read and Write
Staff - Read only (What does staff mean?)
Others - No Access
However, when I tested and switched to a guest and a temp user I created, they can add, read, delete files from the volume root. They cannot however do anything to folders.
Questions:
1. Is security and sharing/permissions applicable to folders and down and not to the root volume?
2. How do I make it so that only I can access the volume from the root down.
Thanks.

Answer 1

Gizzzo wrote:
2. How do I make it so that only I can access the volume from the root down.
Bottom line: you can't. Oh, you might be able to set the preferences so no users can access the drive when it's connected to your machine. (This isn't something that I have ever needed to do, so I'm not sure enough to answer that part.) But you should be aware that there's really no barrier against someone unplugging the drive from your machine, plugging it in to a different one with different users, and accessing all your data.
So, I guess the question is, how safe do you need this to be? Do you just need to make sure that no other users using your computer have access to those drives? Or do you need to keep those files totally secure? In the latter case, the only sure bet is encryption, which can be achieved using an encrypted disk image created with Disk Utility.