Restore of Active Directory, problem.

[Ziek]

The IT department here has no idea how to do a restore of a domain
controller. We have two domains in one forest here, with two DC's per
domain. They have decided, that , in order to test disaster recovery, they
are going to promote two new servers in each domain to be a DC, then
disconnect them from the network, take them to a different site, and
demonstrate how beautiful their disaster recovery went. After their test,
they will delete the servers completely and store them away, and be forced
to clean up active directory using NTDSUTIL.

Does anybody see something wrong with this idea? Besides the fact that it
doesn't really prove disaster recovery, isn't it harmful to the active
directory to be doing tricks like this?

 

[Tomasz Onyszko]

The IT department here has no idea how to do a restore of a domain
controller. We have two domains in one forest here, with two DC's per
domain. They have decided, that , in order to test disaster recovery, they
are going to promote two new servers in each domain to be a DC, then
disconnect them from the network, take them to a different site, and
demonstrate how beautiful their disaster recovery went. After their test,
they will delete the servers completely and store them away, and be forced
to clean up active directory using NTDSUTIL.

Does anybody see something wrong with this idea? Besides the fact that it
doesn't really prove disaster recovery, isn't it harmful to the active
directory to be doing tricks like this?

It shouldn't be harmufull in any way but ... they can restore this DCs
form the bakcup, move to the original network, test it's behaviour in
the original environment and then gracefully demote them.

But ... I think that better procedure will be backup two originally DCs,
then in the test lab install two DCs from the scratch and then try to
restore it form the original DC's backup. All test will be performed in
the lab network, on the original backup data and with the real condition
of disaster recovery when You have to get up from the disaster in Your
network