Active Directory backup

[Tonduma]

Hi all,

I need to backup the Active Directory that resides on a Windows cluster.

I read that NetWorker for Windows uses SYSTEM STATE save set and AD is part of this.

What is your experience about AD backup with NW ?

Information generated by SYSTEM STATE save set can be exported or collected as data, to be copied into other disk subsystem ?

I hope your comments about.

Thank you

 

[speculos]

We use Networker to backup Active Directory, and we were able to recover sucessfully. Read carfully Adm'Guide, and test it before; it works.
To my knowledge it's not possible to export SYSTEM STATE as data, it must be recovered by a Networker client.

 

[Rif123]

Backups of AD usually work just fine. The restores are a bit trickier though. You should always restore the save sets SYSTEM STATE, SYSTEM FILES and SYSTEM DB together. You can't redirect the restore, so you will have to restore it back to its original location and original host.

You have to restore them in complete and cannot browse and restore single files from the system save sets.

If you need to restore the AD to a previous state (ie before you deleted something) you will have to look into authoritative restore. You can read up on that on Microsoft's web. The normal restore of AD is nonauthoritative and that means that the data restored will look old and will be overwritten by other domain controllers if there are any. The MS utility to use is ntdsutil.exe.