Active Directory Disaster Recovery 1

This article only really applies if you have multiple servers running Active Directory.

If you have a single server Active Directory structure, all Active Directory will be on that server, and realistically it doesn't matter if you rebuild the server, nothing is dependent on it, you do not care if you rebuild a new active directory (unless you have lots of users, of course).

However, when you have multiple servers running Active Directory, there is no single copy of the Active Directory on any one machine. Each server holds a copy of the Active Directory in relation to itself. As a forest or Organisational Unit (OU) if you took a backup of each server at a moment in time you would be able to recreate the Active Directory in its entirety.

Furthermore, the Active Directory changes every 30 days. It does, however, keep a copy of the last 30 days tucked safely away, but this means that any backup of the Active Directory is only valid for a maximum of 60 days (before the walls close in on you, the ground starts sinking and your hairs go greyer by the second when trying to bring that server back to life and you KNOW you should have done the Active Directory backup last week...?)

If one server therefore dies, you are faced with a very tricky task of trying to rebuild the Active Directory, something you are unlikely to be able to do easily, if at all. 

So, use the system to backup Active Directory automatically, at least once a week, and include all servers in the backup. You may also want to use a batch file to duplicate these Active Directory backups from server to server, so that any servers that are still left standing at the end of your disaster will each contain a full copy of the Active Directory of the destroyed/toasted servers. And make sure your off-site backups have a copy too. (If I sound paranoid, it is because I have seen myself build a 3 or 4 layer set of safety nets, and when disaster strikes, the disaster always seems to strike in a way that some of your safety nets may well just not have existed, and you begin to wonder if the last safety net/s will hold, or break)

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