Acronis TrueImage with Limited User Rights

One of my favorite tools in my bag of laptop support tricks is Acronis TrueImage. Users can create unattended backup images of their entire system to a USB drive in just a few minutes a week (after the initial image). If their laptop is lost or stolen, everything they need to recover will be on that image so that their system can be restored to new hardware. The image can be mounted as a drive, for individual file recovery (in the event of accidental deletion) and the image can be accessed as it looked on the day of any incremental backup you select.

The problem I've had in using it since 2006 has been that users running with reduced rights (and that should be just about everybody) can't control when the job runs or restart it later, if they didn't happen to have their backup drive handy.

Having checked the documentation, websites, google, etc., I hadn't come up with a workaround. The usual adding of USER group rights to folders and registry settings hadn't helped.

Then I tried the, restrospectively, obvious...

I added the user, using lusrmgr.msc, to the BACKUP OPERATORS group. Duh. I couldn't find mention of this anywhere in Acronis' website or manuals, until I went back and looked specifically for a mention of the BACKUP OPERATORS group.

It did the trick. Now users in that group can access TrueImage and start the backup job and adjust settings. This is slightly more power than I wanted them to have (I just wanted them to be able to kick off the job), but at least they aren't exposed to everything by running as administrator and they can still handle the docked/not docked issues that traveling laptop users face.

If only error messages were a little more specific. The "you don't have rights to do this" message that TrueImage gives is too vague. A good error message would say, "You don't have rights to do this. You must have Administrator or Backup Operator rights to access this program."

The other problem I had was that a scheduled task created by the administrator appeared to be, but wasn't, accessible by the Backup Operator's group. The workaround for that was to delete the administrator's scheduled task and create the task as a Backup Operator, then Administrators OR Backup Operator's can change and start the task.