Anyone Done a Disaster Recovery of AD?

[Fred Yarbrough]

We are running through our yearly disaster recovery drills here at my
company. I was wondering if anyone has successfully tested a disaster
recovery where you were able to restore a W2K3 Active Directory database
from tape. We have several DC's spread over various WAN links but I would
still like to know if it is possible to restore an AD database from tape.
BTW, a friend has told me that Microsoft has a procedure that is supposed to
allow you to do this but there are some gotcha's. He said that he was not
able to successfully restore his AD system even with Microsoft's help.


Thanks,
Fred

 

[Laura E. Hunter \(MVP\)]

When I've done my DR drills, I've used the proceduse outline in KB263532 -
it's fairly comprehensive. The only "gotcha" I've found is that the KB says
something to the effect of "You may need to run an in-place upgrade after
the restore has been done"...and I've found that there's no "may" about
it...do the restore, fiddle with the Registry keys referenced in the KB,
then run an in-place upgrade to let the HAL and any hardware/plug&play
settings straighten themselves out.

 

[Fred Yarbrough]

Thanks Laura. I will check out this article and give it a try.


Fred

 

[Hank Arnold]

I just went through the article and I'm a little puzzled at one aspect. The
process assumes that you have made a full backup of the DC, including the
system state. That's all fine and good, but there will undoubtedly be
updates to the DC and AD from the time that you did the full backup. Could
you, for example, do a full backup and say, daily backups of the system
state. Then do the restore suggested and then restore the System State
backup?

 

[Enkidu]

Um, I do a full backup every night. However, you might want to only do
a full backup when you've changed something, and then do a System
State backup every night. I'd personally do a full backup every night.

If the AD *is* back-level replication will bring it up to date.

Cheers,

Cliff