Follow up - one of the methods worked, but sorry, I lost the link. It wasn't complicated.

The cause of the problem may have been a USB cable. I read that with some read/write or bad disk sector problems, Win10 will write protect files to keep them from being overwritten.

I have an external 'toaster' drive docking station for my backups. I replaced the long USB type A -> B cable with a short one. The long one was one of those see-through plastic sleeves with red covers over the USB connectors. I replaced it with a black one. I even replaced the black one with another because as a road musician, the first rule is "it's always the cable".

After I got the read-only attributes off the files, I could change, move, delete or whatever for any file, but SyncToy and Acronis still didn't work.

I swapped 'toaster' drives from another computer, and that wasn't the problem.

I upgraded to Acronis 2017 (which I needed to do anyway) and still had the problem.

So I was contemplating how to get tech help, where should I go, how to formulate the question, when the idea popped to my head to replace the black USB with the original one. Didn't seem logical because the two short ones work on other USB devices, but I did it anyway and voila! the problem is solved.

So now, is there a difference? I know the color choice isn't probably a factor, but are there two different kinds of USB cables with an A on one end and a B on the other?

I googled this and got no answers (perhaps due to the wrong search terms). But I thought U stood for Universal.

Notes

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