34 Copyright © Acronis International GmbH, 2002-2015
3 Understanding Acronis Backup
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
This section explains the concept of a backup plan (task) owner and an archive owner.
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 local backup plans and tasks
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.
3.2 Credentials used in backup plans and tasks
This section explains the concept of access credentials, backup plan's credentials and task
credentials.
Access credentials
When browsing backup locations, setting up backups, or creating recovery tasks, you may need to
provide credentials for accessing various resources, such as the data you are going to back up or the
location where the backups are (or will be) stored.
If the Credentials cache (p. 31) option is enabled (it is enabled by default), the credentials which you
provide during a console session are saved for use during the later sessions. Thus, there is no need to
