13.6. Locking File Saving on Disk

You can disable the Save and Save As dialogs. This can be useful if you are giving temporary access to a user or you do not want the user to save files to the computer.

Important

This feature will only work in applications which support it. Not all GNOME and third party applications have this feature enabled. These changes will have no effect on applications which do not support this feature.
You prevent applications from file saving by locking down the org.gnome.desktop.lockdown.disable-save-to-disk key. Follow the procedure:

Procedure 13.6. Locking Down the org.gnome.desktop.lockdown.disable-save-to-disk Key

  1. Create the user profile in /etc/dconf/profile/user unless it already exists: 
    user-db:user
system-db:local
  2. Create a local database for machine-wide settings in the /etc/dconf/db/local.d/00-lockdown file. 
    [org/gnome/desktop/lockdown]

# Prevent the user from saving files on disk
disable-save-to-disk=true
  3. Override the user's setting and prevent the user from changing it in /etc/dconf/db/local.d/locks/lockdown: 
    # Lock this key to disable saving files on disk
/org/gnome/desktop/lockdown/disable-save-to-disk
  4. Update the system databases by running 
    # dconf update
Having followed these steps, applications supporting this lockdown key, for example Videos, Image Viewer, Evolution, Document Viewer, or GNOME Shell will disable their "Save As" dialogs.