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Permissions and user rights required to back up and restore

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Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1, Windows Server 2003 with SP2

Permissions and user rights required to back up and restore

You must have certain permissions and user rights to back up files and folders. If you are an administrator or a backup operator in a local group, you can back up any file and folder on the local computer to which the local group applies. Likewise, if you are an administrator or backup operator on a domain controller you can back up any file and folder locally on any computer in the domain or any computer on a domain with which you have a two-way trust relationship. However, if you are not an administrator or a backup operator, and you want to back up files, then you must be the owner of the files and folders that you want to back up, or you must have one or more of the following permissions for the files and folders you want to back up: Read, Read and execute, Modify, or Full Control.

You must also be certain that there are no disk-quota restrictions that may restrict your access to a hard disk. These restrictions make it impossible for you to back up data. You can check whether you have any disk-quota restrictions by right-clicking the disk you want to save data to, clicking Properties, and then clicking the Quota tab.

You can also restrict access to a backup file by selecting Allow only the owner and the Administrator access to the backup data in the Backup Job Information dialog box. If you select this option, only an administrator or the person who created the backup file will be able to restore the files and folders.

Notes

  • You can only use Backup locally; you cannot backup a remote computer.

  • You can only back up and restore System State data on a local computer. You cannot back up and restore System State data on a remote computer even if you are an administrator on the remote computer.

For more information, see Identify members of a local group and Best practices for permissions and user rights.