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BackupAssist Backup Software > Knowledge Base > BackingUpFilesWithSpecificPermissions

Backing up Files with specific permissions

BackupAssist utilises a user account with Administrator privledges to backup the your data, however sometimes you may have directories that do not have inherently administrator rights. You may be concerned that these files are not being backed up, particularly when you attempt to estimate your file selections in BackupAssist and find that the dialog indcates that certain directories could not be estimated due to invalid permissions.

Resolution

Even though the Backup will run as the administrator user (or whatever user that you setup as your backup user in BackupAssist), the backup operation itself should special privileges that allow access the filesystem, regardless of the privileges that individual directories may have.

For example, please see this article:

http://www.comptechdoc.org/os/windows/win2k/win2kbackup.html

Quote: Users with the "Backup files and directories" or "Restore files and directories" permission can backup or restore files. On Windows 2000 computers Administrators and Server Operators can backup and restore data.

Thus, the backup operation is itself "privileged". So whilst you're estimating the file size in BackupAssist and it can't get into certain directories (because BackupAssist doesn't have the privileges that a real backup operation has), when the backup occurs it will pick up those files and directories.

Verification

You can verify this by going to the Advanced Tab of BackupAssist and then accessing the Advanced NTBackup Options. In the popup window, there's a checkbox to log every file that was backed up. Check this.


Figure 1: Advanced NT Backup Options

Now, your next backup report will contain a list of every single file that was backed up. Your report will probably be huge, so be sure to turn off the feature the following day. But you can use the report to verify that your otherwise-restricted directories are actually being backed up, and can be restored.

Page last modified on October 20, 2005, at 12:45 AM