Knowledge Base

Browsing while using SQL Server authentication is disabled on the selected server

Category: Security & data protection
Date: 13 Jul 2009
Product: SQL Backup
When browsing for a file to backup or restore from, the following error may occur:

Browsing error! Browsing while using SQL Server authentication is disabled on the selected server.

Either the account given to the SQL Backup Agent Service or the SQL Backup GUI is connecting using SQL authentication.

If you are using SQL Server authentication on a SQL Server, for security reasons browsing to folders or files on the SQL Server is disabled by default. This is to prevent information about the file system structure being revealed to SQL Authenticated users who do not have permissions to browse the file system on the SQL Server.

You can override this restriction. However, you should do this only after careful consideration.

To enable file browsing by SQL Server users, in the registry folder:

32-bit machines: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Red Gate\SQL Backup\BackupSettingsGlobal\<instance name>

64-bit machines: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Red Gate\SQL Backup\BackupSettingsGlobal\<instance name>

create the registry key AllowSQLBrowsing as type DWORD, and set the value to 1. You must have administrator privileges to do this.