SharePoint 2010 Farm Backup and the User Profile Service

Question

Every night we run a farm backup via PowerShell Script, but after that the User Profile Service is unprovisioned. I've found this article:

http://sharepoint.nauplius.net/2011/06/sharepoint-2010-farm-backup-and-user.html

Using the SharePoint Backup (Backup-SPFarm or via Central Administration) purposely unprovisions the User Profile Service during the backup of the User Profile Service Application. It also automatically re-provisions itself once the backup of the User Profile Service Application is completed. Unfortunately, this means that the Farm Administrator account must be a Local Administrator on the server where the User Profile Synchronization Service is running. This is counter to the documentation on TechNet regarding least privilege. If the Farm Administrator account does not remain as a Local Administrator, the provisioning will fail.

Does anyone have a solution for this problem??

Thanks and Regards

Ben

P.S. Here is another post to this issue:

http://www.toddklindt.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=56f96349-3bb6-4087-94f4-7f95ff4ca81f&ID=275&Web=48e6fdd1-17db-4543-b2f9-6fc7185484fc

Answer 1

both of these come from me. I pinged the SE that owns my case last week -- Microsoft is still in process of evaluating the TechNet documentation to update it to clarify that Local Administrator for the Farm Admin (Timer Service) account is required in order to re-provision the UPA after a backup (of the UPA, or farm) has completed.

Answer 2

I've found this link on technet:

Technet

They say:

Unprovisioning the User Profile Application is 'by design' per Microsoft. This is not something that will be changed. Online documentation will be updated to reflect that the Farm Administrator must also be a local administrator.