Microsoft® Windows Server 2003: Administrator’s Companion

Backing Up and Restoring the Registry

In Chapter 37 you learned how to use the Backup Utility to back up and restore the overall state of your system. This is somewhat different from Windows NT, where you can easily back up the registry by making an emergency repair disk (ERD) or running Ntbackup and selecting the Include Local Registry check box.

The reason for these differences revolves around Active Directory. In Windows NT, a registry backup contains a copy of the SAM database for the local machine (as well as the domain SAM, when you back up a domain controller). In a network using Active Directory, the directory contains most of the information that was formerly in the SAM, which is why you have to perform a two-step recovery process for ...