There was a question on this 8 years ago but it was never satisfactorily answered.
A customer wants an employee to be able to swap out the external (USB) Windows Backup drive, instead of requiring a senior person with Administrator privileges (e.g., the boss doesn’t want to stay late every Friday to do the swap; but doesn’t want to give Administrator privileges to junior users).
It would be very dangerous to have the person just yank the drive out without first logging in and Eject Media. Even when you do the Eject Media, the server takes a long time of machinations to finally say it is safe to remove.
I would expect that putting that person’s User account into the Backup Operators group would give them the ability to Eject Media, but it seems that it doesn’t. Isn’t the most likely routine action of a Backup Operator to swap external drives?
The policy setting “Devices: Allowed to format and eject removable media” would seem to be the problem, solved by changing the setting to allow Interactive Users. But that doesn’t seem to be the solution.
Their server is 2012 Server Essentials R2, although I expect the same solution as regular Server (unfortunately. The advantage of Essentials is that you should not have to dig into the bowels of Server where any change can easily have unintended consequences).
Is there a good way to solve this issue? Thanks.
Peter
