Rights for Acronis services

The Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Agent for Windows, Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Management Server, and Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Storage Node components run as services. When installing any of these components, you need to specify the account under which the component’s service will run.

For each service, you can either create a dedicated user account (recommended in most cases) or specify an existing account of a local or domain user—for example: .\LocalUser or DomainName\DomainUser.

If you choose to create dedicated user accounts for the services, the setup program will create the following user accounts:

  • For the Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Agent for Windows service, Acronis Agent User
  • For the Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Management Server service, AMS User
  • For the Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 Storage Node service, ASN User

The newly created accounts are given the following privileges:

  • All three accounts are assigned the Log on as a service user right.
  • The Acronis Agent User user account is assigned the Adjust memory quotas for a process and Replace a process level token user rights.
  • The Acronis Agent User and ASN User user accounts are included in the Backup Operators group.
  • The AMS User user account is included in the Acronis Centralized Admins group.

The setup program will assign the above listed user rights to any existing account you specify for a corresponding service.

If you choose to specify an existing user account for the agent service or the storage node service, make sure that this account is a member of the Backup Operators group, before proceeding with the installation.

If you choose to specify an existing user account for the management server service, this account will be added to the Acronis Centralized Admins group automatically.

If the machine is part of an Active Directory domain, make sure that the domain’s security policies do not prevent the accounts described in this section (whether existing or newly created) from having the above listed user rights.

Important: After the installation, do not specify a different user account for a component’s service. Otherwise, the component may stop working.

The newly created user accounts are also granted access to the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Acronis (called Acronis registry key) with the following rights: Query Value, Set Value, Create Subkey, Enumerate Subkeys, Notify, Delete, and Read Control.

In addition, there are two Acronis services which run under a system account:

  • The Acronis Scheduler2 Service provides scheduling for Acronis components’ tasks. It runs under the Local System account and cannot run under a different account.
  • The Acronis Remote Agent Service provides connectivity among Acronis components. It runs under the Network Service account and cannot run under a different account.

Rights for Acronis services