Thanks for your observations, which confirm my understanding of the System and Hidden attributes.

Matt recently helped me understand the importance of running the CloudBerry service under a user with appropriate permissions for backup and restore operations. I now run the CB service under the user "BackupOperator", which I created and added to the Windows Backup Operators group and Administrators group. The Backup Operators group seems to have the correct authority to back up all files, but not to restore all files. The Administrators group seems to be the best one to use for restore.

Before I learned how to set up the CB service, I saw "access to path denied" errors resulting from running the service with insufficient permissions. Now, with the service running under the appropriate user account, my "Do not backup system and hidden files" test case produces messages in the log file that appear to be unrelated to CB service setup (directories are "skipped as system and hidden files are not included in backup").

I won't rule out the possibility of user error, but I'll probably open a support ticket (I'm using a paid version of CB).

Thanks for your help, and thanks to Matt for his assistance also.

I wasn't familiar with the Windows term "user profile" but just now learned a little about profiles.

The values of %userprofile% for each Windows account confirm that the root of each account is in c:\users\<user_name>. Here's what the attrib command shows for c:\users and the directories contained in it:


I'm not sure I fully understand how attributes are created or inherited, but I'm assuming that attrib shows the current, effective set of attributes for each folder. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)

I created a simple CloudBerry backup plan to back up everything in C:\Users (and only C:\Users), with "Do not backup system and hidden files" selected. I expect all C:\Users folders except the ones with H or S attribute to be backed up.

When executed, the plan backed up *no* folders and only one file: TESTFILE.TXT. The CloudBerry log file shows:

2018-03-26 10:10:05,854 [PL] [1] INFO - Include system and hidden: False
2018-03-26 10:10:05,860 [PL] [1] INFO - Searching files with path: C:\Users
2018-03-26 10:10:05,903 [PL] [1] INFO - Directory 'C:\Users\Admin' was skipped as system and hidden files are not included in backup
2018-03-26 10:10:05,910 [PL] [1] INFO - Directory 'C:\Users\BackupOperator' was skipped as system and hidden files are not included in backup
2018-03-26 10:10:05,914 [PL] [1] INFO - Directory 'C:\Users\Beebes' was skipped as system and hidden files are not included in backup
2018-03-26 10:10:05,919 [PL] [1] INFO - Directory 'C:\Users\Beebes_Local_1' was skipped as system and hidden files are not included in backup
2018-03-26 10:10:05,924 [PL] [1] INFO - Directory 'C:\Users\Default' was skipped as system and hidden files are not included in backup
2018-03-26 10:10:05,929 [PL] [1] INFO - Directory 'C:\Users\micro.DESKTOP-DL221HI' was skipped as system and hidden files are not included in backup
2018-03-26 10:10:05,934 [PL] [1] INFO - Directory 'C:\Users\Public' was skipped as system and hidden files are not included in backup

Do I need to learn more about attributes to make this work like I want it to?

I think you've solved my problem.

My BackupOperator account was a member of the Backup Operators group but not the Administrators group. I added BackupOperator to the Administrators group, and now I get no errors -- either during backup or restore -- when the CloudBerry Backup Service is running under the BackupOperator account.

I could try a variation of this configuration: Instead of adding my newly created BackupOperator account to both the Administrators and Backup Operators groups (and running the Backup Service under BackupOperator), I could instead add the predefined Windows Admin account to the Backup Operators group, and run the Backup Service under Admin. Is one of these approaches better than the other?

In any case, I think I'm ready to start using Cloudberry regularly for backups.

I appreciate your help and your patience. Some or all of my questions might be answered in existing CloudBerry documentation or in the forums, but I had some trouble determining what my mistakes were. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

I have "use backup operator" selected in the backup plan (Advanced Options page in the Backup Plan Wizard). With the CloudBerry Backup Service running under my BackupOperator account, the backup plan runs with no errors.

I create a restore plan to recover the file I just backed up. I leave the Backup Service unchanged, so it's still running under the BackupOperator account. When I run the restore plan, it shows the "Access to the path is denied" error.

I then change the Backup Service to use the Admin account, restart the restore plan, and it runs without error.

Is there a separate option somewhere to use backup operator during restore? Or should I not try to run the Backup Service under BackupOperator during restore?

Matt:

Thanks so much for your response to my question. I confirmed that restarting the Backup Service under the Admin account fixes the errors I saw. And I now see where to select the backup prefix.

On my old Windows 7 PC, I had the Backup Service running under the BackupOperator account, which I created and made a member of the Backup Operators group. For full backups, that seemed to work better than running under the Admin account. Admin was prevented from accessing a few files that BackupOperator was allowed to back up.

I tried to use the same setup on Windows 10 -- I created the BackupOperator account, made it a member of the Backup Operators group, and restarted the Backup Service under the BackupOperator account. With that configuration on Windows 10, CloudBerry gives me the "Access to path is denied" error during restore operations. I think I've skipped something in the setup, but I don't know what it is. When I look at the CloudBerryBackup service information in Task Manager, the Group column is blank.

Do you recommend using an account in the Backup Operators group for the Backup Service? If so, can you tell me what I need to do to make it work?

If it's more appropriate I'll submit a support ticket for this question, with logs.

Thanks.