Administrator account has insufficient permissions

[kidziti]

After spending most of the only free day I had trying to configure permissions to back up a NAS that badly needs redundancy protection, I've managed to only make things worse and am obviously going in precisely the wrong direction despite reading the manual and researching the forum responses. The first step was migrating share-level access to user-level access mode on the NAS. While share-level was end-of-life, migrating from Windows 7 to Windows 10 further exacerbated the incongruities, but it was really about making things as perfect as I could for Retrospect to smoothly see and backup that NAS with no errors and no issues. It took some time and a bit of trial and error to figure out, but the NAS runs beautifully now on user-level and access via Windows 10 explorer is flawless.

I then enabled the Administrator account in Windows 10 specifically for Retrospect to use. Again, there was a learning curve when I tried to assign it to "specified user" in the security section of preferences. It would give me errors telling me that something was wrong - yet stop short of telling me what it was. So I hit the curve again - figured that while Windows default when enabling the Administrator account is no password, I needed to add a password because Retrospect cannot have a "blank" in the password box. It took me some extra time to understand what to put in the log on to prompt - and realized it was the computer name. Once I got that done, it told me that the new access would be effective after a reboot. So I rebooted. No errors. But the logged-in user is what shows in the title bar. Yet when I open Preferences -> Security, it shows me it's the Administrator account running the show. So Retrospect apparently doesn't even know who is running the backup - or if it does, it is telling me something that is not true. I even added a login as to each volume I am backing up (also as Administrator) in an effort to make it crystal clear to Retrospect that that is the access I want it to have. In all, it's this disconnect from Retrospect that has me so circumspect.

I am including a screen shot that pretty much says it all - the specified user that Retrospect says is the user while at the same time whispering in the title bar that it's really the logged-in user, the access to the PC's hard drive while showing total permissions denial on all four shares of the NAS. The back story to this is that our NAS crashed last month. Retrospect 7.7 was not backing things up as I thought it was. I almost lost everything - irreplaceable memories, documents and data - but managed to recover 99.99% of it all over several slow days of SMB access. A rigorous testing showed the NAS was perfectly robust but rapidly rising ATA errors on two of the four drives crashed the NAS (if only one disk was bad, the redundancy might have preserved the data better.) So I purchased 4 new 1 Tb WD red drives (made specifically for NAS environments), and two external WD 4 Tb drives. I reloaded the NAS and the external drives are in place. The only thing missing is a reliable backup program. The idea is to use the NAS as a home network file server and back up alternatively to each of the two external drives. I upgraded Retrospect to the latest version (16.something) and with the new drives, updated program, etc. I think I 'm doing everything right. But after that experience last month, it is a huge priority for me to get Retrospect running as it is designed to do, and with every unexplained error, I am losing confidence in the very program that should be all about building confidence.

[mbennett]

If you just bought an upgrade then you qualify for support.  Submit this to Retrospect support via their website, or call them.  They work pretty long hours and they can probably get this straightened out in a few minutes.

 

[mbennett]

Oh, and one more thing.  Restore something off your backups on a regular basis.  Put it on you calendar.  It's easy to restore an entire directory of pictures or documents to a new directory, check that it worked then delete them.  A backup is only valuable if it works and the only way to know it works is to restore it.

 

[Nigel Smith]

On 11/3/2019 at 12:55 PM, kidziti said:

So I hit the curve again - figured that while Windows default when enabling the Administrator account is no password, I needed to add a password because Retrospect cannot have a "blank" in the password box

Blame Windows for that -- allowing you to create an admin-level account with a blank password is beyond stupid in this day and age.

On 11/3/2019 at 12:55 PM, kidziti said:

It took me some extra time to understand what to put in the log on to prompt - and realized it was the computer name.

I'm no Windows guru (mbennett?) but I've a feeling that's the "domain" field. Since you aren't running under Active Directory or similar then yes, you should use the local computer name. But that probably won't work as the login for your NAS, since "T1650\Administrator" and "NAS\Administrator" aren't the same user. So I'd do as you and add the auto-login via the "Volumes" pane.

What I'd suggest is you create a new user on the NAS -- 'retrospect', 'backups', or similar -- and give that user full access to everything you want to back up. Then use *that* account rather than Administrator as the auto-login account in RS's "Volumes" pane. If nothing else it'll make troubleshooting easier later, being able to refer to different accounts for different operations! It'll certainly make it easier to check the NAS's logs to see which account you PC is using to try and access the shares, and why you are being denied.

But as mbennett says -- if you've just bought RS then you're entitled to support. Worth it if only to find out about the user display in the title bar...

[kidziti]

Thanks, Nigel. I was thinking of making an account specifically for Retrospect but unless I can figure out how to give it the same broad access as Administrator, I'm not sure it will work and don't see any advantage of that over using the logged-in user account. I'm still curious how I can designate the Administrator as the specified user, have Retrospect acknowledge it by asking me to reboot, and then have it be completely ignored by Retrospect without even an error message. It is either a serious flaw in the design of the program, or (more likely) there is something I simply do not understand about setting it up. If I could figure that out, I think it would open up another avenue of understanding this software. In any case, I'll be struggling with this the rest of the day and hopefully will get a bit further than I managed to over the weekend. 

[DavidHertzberg]

kidziti,

My vision (as well as other abilities) was  never good enough for me to have pitched in the Major Leagues, so I have trouble reading the screenshots in your OP.  However it looks as if you've been getting -1017 errors.  Have you read this Knowledge Base article?

Disclaimer: I'm a Retrospect Mac administrator.

[kidziti]

Hi folks and especially David and Nigel and mbennet - 

Just to update you all, I finally had a moment where my free hours lined up with California and I could speak with tech support. I spoke with a very helpful tech there (Kyle) and we went over everything in pretty granular detail. The setup to him seems perfect, and so we are ascribing the 1017's to a fluke (although in the digital world we all know that such an autonomous binary does not exist.) I suspect that somewhere along the line I had something misconfigured, but at this time everything is running perfectly. I'll let it continue and if any other errors pop up, I'll let you know so other people struggling as I have might also find a clue. Thanks for your help.

[Nigel Smith]

13 hours ago, kidziti said:

Thanks, Nigel. I was thinking of making an account specifically for Retrospect but unless I can figure out how to give it the same broad access as Administrator, I'm not sure it will work and don't see any advantage of that over using the logged-in user account.

To be clear -- the "retrospect" account is on your NAS. All you need to do is set up another account on the NAS with full access to all the NAS's contents, then enter those details in the "Log in as..." dialog after right-clicking the NAS volume in RS's "Volumes" window. How you set up the account will depend on the NAS's OS -- some come preconfigured with a "backup" group, most (home) ones don't. The nerd in me always advises against giving the backup account the same privs as the "admin" account on the NAS -- if nothing else, find a way to prevent the backup account being used to administer the NAS via the web interface, ie give it access to file sharing only. Not really necessary in a home environment, but restricting accounts to what is necessary and no more than that is a good general habit to get into (which is a case of "do as I say, not as I do", I'm afraid 😞 ).

There are many other advantages. In this case the two that first spring to mind are a clear differentiation between "Administrator" (the account you are running Retrospect under on the PC) and "backup" (the account RS uses to access the NAS shares) and the ability to go through the NAS's logs looking for backup related events without having to manually filter out all the "Administrator" entries created simply by you trying to look at the logs!

[kidziti]

18 hours ago, Nigel Smith said:

To be clear -- the "retrospect" account is on your NAS. All you need to do is set up another account on the NAS with full access to all the NAS's contents, then enter those details in the "Log in as..." dialog after right-clicking the NAS volume in RS's "Volumes" window. 

Great idea! I've been trying to get those permissions through the Windows OS when in fact maybe I can do it through user permissions on the NAS. It's too late for me to check into that tonight but perhaps tomorrow night or Thursday. I'll report back if I can do it.

PS - it's an old Linux (Sparc) based NetGear NV+ (version 1) and I deleted the pre-installed backup share. Otherwise I'd just explore those permissions.