I’ve been using Cuteftp (v8.3) to manage my files between hard drive and server. Everything was working ok. Then all of a sudden I tried to view a picture file on my server and CuteFTP gave me the following error –
You must be an administrator or have the appropriate permissions to perform this operation
The built in CuteFTP help system didn’t help at all. I tried searching for the phrase “must be an administrator or have the appropriate permissions” but nothing came up. So I searched Google and found several results on the first page. I found several different potential causes for this error, but none of them helped.
Solved
I eventually tracked the reason for this error. It was caused by my virus checker Bitdefender Internet Security 2017. I had recently activated one of its features – Ransomware Protection and Bitdefender had quietly decided that CuteFTP was trying to alter my protected files. So it blocked it from changing anything.
I can only assume that CuteFTP gave this operation error because it was unable to write to my hard drive – and didn’t know why. I fixed the issue by adding CuteFTP as a safe program. This is likely to be an unusual cause of the error, so if not applicable you should continue researching all the other causes.