Access denied for some folders

Support
1

“Error reported while accessing file: C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\SystemData\ => (5) Access denied: [\?”

It is not possible possible to browse this folder with file explorer in Windows either. But some other software can access the folder and browse/copy files from it.

Running Duplicati - 2.0.2.10_canary_2017-10-11

2

This is most likely due to the account under which Duplicati is running doesn’t have permissions to that folder.

Things I can think of include:

  • If you’re running the tray icon only, you could try starting it with “run as administrator” and see if it that works (I’m not sure it will)
  • give the user account Duplicati is running under rights to the folder (generally a per-folder manual process, yuck)
  • give the user account Duplicati is running under Administrator rights (not the safest thing to do, but should work)
  • run the Duplicati as a service under the Administrator account (probably the “right” way to do it, but appropriateness depends on your user environment)
3

I’m running tray icon as administrator.

But as i wrote, I can’t access that folder with windows explorer either. But some other software can access the folder with no special configuration/settings. So it should be possible in some way I think.

4

I agree it should be possible, but may not be worth the effort. I find that most of what’s in C:\ProgramData\ isn’t worth backing up (in the sense that I wouldn’t even know how to use it if I ever needed to restore it).

What version of Windows are you running?

5

Windows 10 and server 2012. Same issue on all PC’s… There is more folders with the same problem.

6

Yeah, I get the same error (in Windows Explorer) on my Windows 10 machine.

Sorry - I don’t know what else to try, but since it seems to be a general Windows permissions issue a more general Google search might give you some ideas of what permissions you’ll need to give the Duplicati user account so that it can access those folders.

7

Yes, no NTFS permissions are granted for %PROGRAMDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\SystemData, even administrators don’t have access to this folder.
In theory, you could hack yourself into that folder by taking ownership, but you would have to do this for all protected system folders, which I don’t recommend.

I guess you have better luck when you install Duplicati as a service and start the service with the Local System account (it does that by default):

Additionally, you could set advanced option --snapshot-policy to “On” or “Required”. With this setting, Duplicati will create a VSS snapshot of the volumes containing your source files before starting the backup.
The Local System account has Read access to the full contents of the snapshot.

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