Samuele Padalino
Week 5 Essay
Backing up Active Directory If you lose your Active Directory, you lose everything. Your Windows domain will stop working shortly after losing the Active Directory. The only way to prevent losing your Active Directory and Windows domain is by backing up the Active Directory. Every domain controller has a full copy of the directory and the ability to modify it. To ensure the safety of your active directory, you need to back up any one of the domain controllers. But if you want to be able to restore any domain controller, you’ll have to back them all up. To back up the Active Directory means to capture the System State, this is a collection of system-specific data that includes the Active Directory database and related log and transaction files, Registry, COM+ configuration information, boot files, the SYSVOL system volume, certificate information, and a few other system files. There is a free utility tool provided by Microsoft in Windows 2008. The backup tools will be able to capture a System State. But you have to keep the backup software in a different location than the domain controller in order to easily restore it.
To recover the Active Directory you can use the ntdsutil snapshot command to create snapshots of the Active Directory database. By scheduling a task to periodically create snapshots, you can obtain additional copies of the Active Directory database over time. You can use these copies to better identify when the forest-wide failure occurred and then choose the best backup to restore. To create snapshots, use the version of ntdsutil that ships with Windows Server 2008 or the Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) for Windows Vista or later. The target DC can run any version of Windows Server.
Active Directory Management Pack (ADMP) monitors Active Directory — and the external components that are related to Active