Backup System State

[Craig Pfaff]

Hi,

This is fortunetaly in a testing enviroment. I've got W2K Server, two
servers all together. I did a system state backup with the Windows backup
utility on one of the servers, I then deleted two user accounts, did a
restore of the system state backup and it showed that everything restored
fine but the two user accounts where never restored at all. So I then took
the system state backup and restored it to the other server and that was a
mistake I'll never do again. AD is completely trashed. I was told at a
Microsoft seminar that you backup the system state data and restore it to a
different server, that didn't work here. So a blanket question, do you have
any thought as to why I couldn't restore the two users, and the way I did
the restore on the other server is there any way to fix that. I tried a
dcpromo and it can't find AD? Also when I first did the restore to the
other server I could see the two users I deleted but then AD became
corrupted.

Thanks in advance, Craig

 

[Paul Bergson]

If both servers are DC's then the restore won't do anything for you, you
would have to do an authoritative restore.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;241594

If you did a restore on the other server and the first server was still up
you restore the same name, same sid, etc... Bad idea

 

[Enkidu]

Hi,

This is fortunetaly in a testing enviroment. I've got W2K Server, two
servers all together. I did a system state backup with the Windows backup
utility on one of the servers, I then deleted two user accounts, did a
restore of the system state backup and it showed that everything restored
fine but the two user accounts where never restored at all.

Like Paul says.

In all probability they did restore - until the next replication. At
the next replication AD checks which DC has the latest ("authorative")
data. Since the old DC (without the accounts) is the most up to date,
the restored DC is deemed out of date and the accounts are deleted!

The way out is to force the data on the restored DC to be authorative,
by marking it as such in the restored DC (basically by upping the
sequence/serial number of the object *above* that on the old DC).
Since the data on the restored DC is deemed more up to date than that
on the old DC (for this object anyway) it is replicated to the old DC
rather than being deleted from the restored DC.

As to restoring the backup over the other DC, I don't think that there
is any way out, except to restore a backup of the System State of the
proper machine. Probably. I'm not sure.

Cheers,

Cliff