Special Edition Using Microsoft Active Directory

Additional Concepts

Some additional details should be considered that you might find helpful when planning your disaster recovery operations.

Offline Backup

You can perform an offline backup of the Active Directory. You only need to either boot into directory services restore mode and copy the NTDS.dit file to an alternative location or use the recovery console to make a copy of the file. Performing an offline backup is possible because, during a smooth shutdown, the transactions are committed to the database. For more information on the recovery console, see the Troubleshooting section, later in this chapter.

Determining the Date of the Last Full Backup

To properly determine the date of the last backup, you must use NTDSUtil. This provides a ...