Team members, roles and seats
Invite people to your account, give each one the right role, understand how seats are counted and bought, and what happens when you have more people than seats.
The short version
A team member is a person with their own sign-in inside your account. They do not get a plan, a storage allowance or a device limit of their own — your plan's storage and device slots are shared by everyone. What a person may see and do is decided by their role, and the role is enforced on the server, so it holds in the customer portal, in the desktop app and on the command line alike.
- •Every invited person uses one seat — admins, operators, viewers and users alike. The account owner never uses one.
- •Every plan includes a number of seats. Professional and Server customers can buy more at $10 per user per month; the exact amount in your billing currency is shown in the portal before you confirm.
- •If you ever have more people than seats, nobody is removed and no backup stops. You get a banner and e-mails, new invitations pause, and after a 14-day grace period the newest members over the limit lose sign-in only — their computers keep backing up.
ℹ Note
Roles
Five account roles. The one-line descriptions below are the same ones the portal shows when you pick a role.
- •Owner — Full access to the whole account, including billing. The owner never uses a seat.
- •Admin — The whole account, every site — everything except billing changes.
- •Operator — Their assigned sites only — run backups and restores, manage schedules.
- •Viewer — Their assigned sites only — read-only, no changes. A Viewer cannot create, run or restore backups, in the portal or on a computer.
- •User — Their own computer(s) only — back up and restore their own files. The right role for a protected employee; see My backups for team members.
Operators and Viewers can additionally be limited to specific sites, each with a per-site role (Site admin, Site operator or Site viewer). Admins and the Owner always see every site; a User sees only computers assigned to them, whichever site they are in.
💡 Tip
Inviting team members
The owner, and members with team-management permission, invite from the Team page. Inviting is done in the customer portal; the command line only points you there.
- •Open Team in the customer portal and click Invite team member. The seat meter at the top ("7 of 10 seats used") tells you how many seats are left.
- •Enter one e-mail address per line, or upload a CSV with the columns e-mail, name, role, site (header row optional; roles are Admin, Operator, Viewer or User). The dialog tells you how many of your remaining seats the list will use as you type.
- •Pick a role. Business plans pre-select User; you can add a name for a single invite.
- •For an Operator or Viewer, tick the sites they belong to and choose their site role. Admins and Users have no site picker.
- •Click Send invitation. Each person receives an e-mail with a set-your-password link (someone who was on your team before and was removed gets a sign-in link instead). On Professional and larger plans the e-mail also suggests a managed recovery key — a recommendation only; nothing about encryption changes.
- •The person appears as Invited until they accept — by signing in to the portal, or simply by installing Backup Engine on their computer and signing in with the invited address.
There are no CLI commands that read or change your team. From version 1.38, backupengine users list prints the link to the portal's Team page, and users invite, users remove and users role print the same link, change nothing and exit with code 1. Version 1.37 and earlier print a confirmation such as “Invitation sent” but change nothing either — use the portal.
backupengine users list # Team members are managed in the customer portal: <customer portal>/en/team
⚠ Warning
Seats and the seat add-on
Your seat limit is the number of seats included in your plan (or a limit your provider set for you) plus any seats you have bought. People who are Invited or Active use a seat; suspended people do not. Infra Teams and Enterprise plans have no seat limit.
- •Open Billing in the customer portal. The Seats block shows "N / M seats", how many are included with your plan and how many you have purchased.
- •Click Add seats (also on the Team page). Choose how many; the dialog shows the price per seat in your billing currency and the monthly total.
- •Click Continue to checkout. The seats are added to your existing subscription and the prorated amount for the rest of the current period is charged today — the toast tells you the exact amount, and the Team page meter updates immediately.
- •To buy fewer seats later, open Billing → Manage subscription (Stripe's billing portal) and lower the seat quantity. The new limit shows on the Team page within moments. Accounts invoiced by cheque or pre-authorized debit e-mail support@backupengine.com instead.
Add-ons are bought in the customer portal; the CLI prints the billing link. The output below is from version 1.38; in 1.37 and earlier use billing addons list, which prints the same link after an “Active add-ons: none” line that does not reflect what you own.
backupengine billing addons # Plans, add-ons, invoices and the payment method are managed in the customer portal: <customer portal>/en/billing
- •Seats are sold on the Professional (3 included) and Server (10 included) plans. The Free plan includes one seat and does not sell more — upgrade to invite more people.
- •Only the account owner (or a member with billing permission) can add seats. Admins see the same banners but are pointed to the owner.
- •Accounts managed by a service provider: your provider sets the seat limit. When every seat is in use the invite dialog shows the seats-full card instead of the form — ask your provider to raise the limit.
- •Lowering your seat limit below the people in use (a smaller plan, fewer purchased seats, or a payment that could not be collected) puts the account over its limit — see the next section.
What happens when you have more people than seats
Being over the limit is handled gently, in this order. At no point is anyone's data touched or any backup interrupted.
- •Right away: the owner and admins see a red banner ("12 people, 10 seats — add 2 seats or remove 2 people by <date>"). The owner is e-mailed with the same deadline. New invitations and new computer sign-ins by team members are paused; everything else keeps working.
- •After 7 days: a reminder e-mail with the remaining days.
- •After 14 days (the grace period): the newest members over the limit — by the date they were invited — are suspended for the seat limit. They can no longer use the portal, which shows "Your seat is suspended" (so does the desktop app from version 1.38). Their computers keep backing up on schedule, and administrators can still restore their files. A suspension only ever happens after the owner (or, for a managed account, the provider) was actually e-mailed about the deadline.
- •Add seats, raise the limit or remove people, and the suspensions are lifted automatically, newest first. Nobody has to be re-invited.
ℹ Note
Suspending a member (by hand)
Suspend… in a member's menu is different from a seat-limit suspension: the person loses access to the portal and the app and their computers stop backing up until you reactivate them. The portal asks you to confirm for that reason. If you only want the person gone but their computers protected, remove them and keep their devices with the company instead (next section). A suspended member does not use a seat, and reactivating them needs a free seat.
Removing a team member (offboarding)
Removing a person signs them out immediately, frees their seat (which may lift a seat-limit suspension for someone else), and lets you decide what happens to the computers assigned to them.
- •Open Team, open the ⋯ menu on the person's row and choose Remove….
- •Keep with the company (default): their computers keep backing up and administrators can restore the files.
- •Transfer to another person: pick a current team member or the account owner. The computers and their backup history move to that person — a User who inherits a computer sees it on My backups.
- •Place on legal hold: the backups are kept and cannot be deleted from the account until the hold is lifted (see Legal hold below).
- •Move to Trash: their computers stop backing up and go to the Trash now; you can restore them from Trash until they are permanently deleted.
- •Review the summary and confirm with the Remove button, which names the person (and the number of computers, when you chose Trash). The action is recorded in the audit log.
Offboarding is done in the customer portal; backupengine users remove does not change your team.
💡 Tip
Legal hold
A legal hold protects a computer's backups from deletion inside your account: while the hold is on, the device cannot be moved to the Trash or permanently deleted, its history is skipped by retention clean-up, removing the person it belongs to from the team cannot trash it, and the account itself cannot be purged while any of its devices is held. The computer's backup sets are protected too: nobody can delete them — not in the portal, not in the admin console and not in the Backup Engine app on that computer, which (from version 1.38) shows “This backup set belongs to a computer on legal hold and can't be deleted.” and removes nothing. Holds are placed when you remove a team member and choose Place on legal hold. The owner, or a member who manages devices, lifts a hold from Devices: Lift legal hold in the device's ⋯ menu, or on the device page, where the hold, its date and its reason are shown. To hold a computer whose person stays on the team, ask support@backupengine.com or your service provider, who place it from the admin console. Every change is in the audit log.
⚠ Warning
Restoring a member's files (Restore on behalf)
The owner and administrators can restore a member's files for them — for example onto a replacement computer after a laptop was lost. The restore runs on the receiving computer, which decrypts the files itself; the portal never sees them.
- •Open Team, click the person's row to open their panel, and choose Restore on behalf.
- •Choose the backup to restore from (only that person's computers are listed), then the files or folders you want.
- •Under Restore to device, pick the computer that should receive the files, and type the destination folder on it. Files are restored under that folder and never over their original location.
- •Confirm. The person is e-mailed "A restore was started on your behalf", and the restore is recorded in the audit log. If the e-mail could not be sent, the dialog says so — let them know yourself.
- •The computer picks the restore up at its next check-in, and the dialog shows its progress. A computer that uses its own encryption passphrase finishes the restore only once it is unlocked.
Restore on behalf is started from the customer portal. The command line restores only on the computer it runs on, so the person (or you, at their computer) can restore their own files there instead:
backupengine restore list "My Documents" # restore points for a set backupengine restore run "My Documents" --output D:\Restored # newest point to a folder
⚠ Warning
Managing members
- •Change role: open the member's panel, pick the role and click Save. The portal asks you to confirm and explains what changes; switching someone to User removes their site assignments.
- •Re-send invitation: for someone still Invited, ⋯ → Re-send invitation; for someone who has already signed in, ⋯ → Send a sign-in link. The link goes only to the person's own e-mail address — the portal never shows or copies it, so nobody else can sign in with it. The original invitation date is kept. Re-sends count towards the 30 invitations per hour.
- •Forgotten password: a person who has already signed in and lost their password uses Forgot password on the sign-in page. Backup Engine support cannot re-send them an invitation either.
- •Restore on behalf: see Restoring a member's files above.
- •Protection at a glance: the Team table shows each person's computers, whether they are protected, how long since their last backup, and whether two-factor authentication is on.
- •Report e-mails: add a teammate's address to the notification recipients to send them backup reports — see Reports & Notifications.