User guide

3 Understanding Acronis Backup & Recovery 11

This section attempts to give its readers a clear understanding of the product so that they can use

the product in various circumstances without step-by-step instructions.

3.1 Owners and credentials

This section explains the concept of owner and the meaning of a backup plan's (or task's) credentials.

Plan (task) owner

A local backup plan owner is the user who created or last modified the plan.

A centralized backup plan owner is the management server administrator who created or last

modified the centralized backup plan.

Tasks, belonging to a backup plan, either local or centralized, are owned by the backup plan owner.

Tasks that do not belong to a backup plan, such as the recovery task, are owned by the user who has

created or last modified the task.

Managing a plan (task) owned by another user

Having Administrator privileges on the machine, a user can modify tasks and local backup plans

owned by any user registered in the operating system.

When a user opens a plan or task for editing, which is owned by another user, all passwords set in

the task are cleared. This prevents the "modify settings, leave passwords" trick. The program displays

a warning each time you are trying to edit a plan (task) last modified by another user. On seeing the

warning, you have two options:

 Click Cancel and create your own plan or task. The original task will remain intact.

 Continue editing. You will have to enter all credentials required for the plan or task execution.

Archive owner

An archive owner is the user who saved the archive to the destination. To be more precise, this is the

user whose account was specified when creating the backup plan in the Where to back up step. By

default, the plan's credentials are used.

Plan's credentials and task credentials

Any task running on a machine runs on behalf of a user. When creating a plan or a task, you have the

option to explicitly specify an account under which the plan or the task will run. Your choice depends

on whether the plan or task is intended for manual start or for executing on schedule.

Manual start

You can skip the Plan's (Task) credentials step. Every time you start the task, the task will run under

the credentials with which you are currently logged on. Any person that has administrative privileges

on the machine can also start the task. The task will run under this person's credentials.

The task will always run under the same credentials, regardless of the user who actually starts the

task, if you specify the task credentials explicitly. To do so, on the plan (task) creation page: