Managing Your Backup Service: Common Questions Answered

If you're running a managed service business or handling backup operations for multiple clients, you've probably run into some head-scratching moments about account structures, billing, and technical setup. Let me walk you through the most common questions that come up.

The Multi-Customer Account Question

Here's something that trips up a lot of people: can you really manage everything from one master account?

Sort of. You can use a single partner administrator account for your daily tasks like checking backup statuses and doing file restores. That part's straightforward.

But here's the catch: when you're setting up the initial agent deployment for a customer or handling certain types of restores, you'll need to create individual customer accounts. These can share the same email address as your main account, but each one needs its own unique account name.

Why the hassle? Security and data isolation. Each customer's data stays completely separate from everyone else's. It's not just a best practice thing, it's actually a smart way to protect both you and your clients if something goes wrong.

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Trial Period Billing Confusion

Let's say you're testing out a service provider account during the trial period, and you accidentally create a customer account in Production mode instead of Trial mode. Are you going to get charged?

Nope. During your 30-day trial period, nothing gets charged regardless of whether you set up accounts in trial or production mode. The trial clock applies to everything under that main SP account.

White Labeling and Custom Branding

Can you slap your own logo and branding on the platform? Absolutely. Head to Settings and then the Branding tab, and you can customize how things look.

If you want to go further and redirect your own URLs to access the services (so clients never see the original provider's branding), that's doable too, but it requires some additional configuration steps. There's a knowledge base article that walks through the technical setup for custom URL mapping.

Controlling User Access

Company administrators have full control over who gets in and what they can do. This includes creating new user accounts, deleting old ones, temporarily suspending access when needed, assigning different roles to users, and controlling which services each user can access.

It's pretty granular, which is helpful when you've got different team members who need different levels of access.

Reporting Capabilities

You get two main types of reporting:

Service usage reports show you the actual numbers: how many devices you're protecting (broken down by type), how many gigabytes of storage you're using, and other metered items. You can pull this data through the API too if you want to automate reporting or integrate it into your own dashboards.

Activity dashboards and widgets give you the operational view: which backup jobs succeeded or failed, how much storage space is available in different locations, active alerts, and other real-time parameters.

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API Access

Yes, there's a REST API available. If you're building custom integrations or want to automate account provisioning, reporting, or other tasks, the developer documentation covers all the available endpoints and methods.

Partner Certification Requirements

If you're a partner planning to support customers on the platform, you'll need to complete online training and become a certified engineer. The training is available at kb.acronis.com/msptraining and covers what you need to provide first-level support.

It's not just a checkbox exercise. The certification actually helps you troubleshoot issues faster and understand the platform's quirks before your customers run into problems.

Who Handles Customer Support Calls

In the service provider model, you're the first line of defense. Your customers contact you for technical support, not the platform provider directly. That's why the certification matters: you need to be able to handle common issues yourself.

If you hit something that's genuinely beyond first-level support, you can escalate to the provider's technical team. But the idea is that most questions and problems get resolved by you, which keeps things moving quickly for your customers.

Setting Yourself Up for Success

The key to making all this work smoothly is understanding the account structure from the start. A lot of frustration comes from trying to force everything through a single account when the system is designed for separation between your admin functions and individual customer operations.

Take the time to set up your account hierarchy correctly, get your team certified, and familiarize yourself with the reporting tools. It'll save you countless support tickets and confused customers down the road.