Why does Macrium ask for a Username and Password to schedule a backup?

In this excerpt from
Answercast #92 I look at the reasons that backup programs need your Windows
login in order to create an automatic backup schedule.

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Macrium asks for username and password

No, this is actually something else. This has nothing to do with protecting your backups.

The ability to encrypt your backups with a password is a completely separate function and I think you’ve identified that.

Macrium needs to log in

What this is for is when you are telling Macrium Reflect to schedule backups – be they incremental, or full, or otherwise. What it needs to do is, at the appropriate time, at the scheduled time, it needs to login as you. The only way it can login as you is if it has saved your username and password. So that’s actually required for the program to run in a scheduler.

You can run it by hand as you said, by just running it from the start menu, but you’re already logged in. In other words, Macrium doesn’t have to do anything special at that point.

But whenever you schedule a task, the task needs to know what account to “run as” – and to do so, it needs to be able to login as that account in order to run the task. Like I said, that requires your username and password.

Encrypting backups

That is only for scheduling and has nothing to do with encryption. Encrypting and protecting your backup is, like I said, a separate password, a separate step.

How do you enter it? Well… you enter it when you’re asked.

In other words, when you are scheduling your backups – and it asks you for your username and password – enter in your Windows login username and password and that then should allow Macrium to automatically perform your backups on a schedule.

(Transcript lightly edited for readability.)