Copyright © Acronis, Inc., 2000-2009
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1.
Introduction
Microsoft Active Directory is a central component of the Windows platform, which can be found in
any size of Windows environment. Active Directory contains critical information, availability of which
is important for businesses to operate.
This white paper is created to enable system administrators to implement their own recovery
solution for Active Directory using Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 software.
2.
Backup and Recovery overview
Microsoft Active Directory (AD) services use a database located on the file system of a domain
controller. If more than one domain controller is available, the information stored in the database is
constantly replicated between multiple domain controllers.
A Windows component called Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) is used to create a consistent copy
of the AD database.
Active Directory recovery scenarios may consist of recovery of a crashed domain controller, recovery
of a corrupted AD database, and restoring of accidentally deleted or modified AD records. Required
operations and tools may vary depending on the type of information that needs to be restored, and
availability of other domain controllers.
3.
Active Directory backup
In Windows (including Windows 2003 and Windows 2008), the Active Directory database is typically
located in the %systemroot%\NTDS folder (such as C:\Windows\NTDS) of a domain controller. While
this location is used by default, it is configurable. The Ntdsutil command-line utility may help you to
find the current location. Note that the database and the transaction logs may be stored on different
volumes, so be sure both are included in the backup.
Because Active Directory service is almost always running, VSS should be used to ensure consistency
of the files after the backup. Without VSS, the files would be in a so-called crash-consistent state –
that is, after the restore, the system would be in the same state as if the power were disconnected at
the moment when backup began.
While such backup is good enough for most applications, databases (including the Active Directory
database) may not be able to start from a crash-consistent state, and would require manual recovery.