Backup

Active Directory Authoritative Restore YOUTUBE

Windows Server troubleshooting

Useful shelf life of a system-state backup of Active Directory

The tombstone lifetime attribute is located on the enterprise-wide DS config object. The path for this attribute is:CN=Directory Service,CN=Windows NT,CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=COMPANY,DC=COM

tombstone

The “tombstoneLifetime” attribute represents the number of days a backup of Active Directory can be used in addition to the frequency with which Garbage Collection routines (removing items previously marked for deletion) are run. For more information about Garbage Collection, see The Active Directory database Garbage Collection process and calculation of allowed intervals.

AD Forest Recovery – Backing up the System State data

System State Backups

The system state backup includes only the components needed to restore Active Directory. The system state includes the following:

  • Sysvol from the domain controller – The sysvol includes group policy objects but I still recommend you backup group policy from the GPMC.
  • Active Directory database and related files
  • DNS zones and records (only for Active Directory integrated DNS)
  • System registry
  • Com+ Class registration database
  • System startup files
  • The system state backup is best used for recovering Active Directory only on the same server.  It cannot be used to recover a corrupt server operation system. Microsoft does not support restoring a system state backup from one computer to a second computer of a different make, model, or hardware configuration

How to Backup Active Directory (Full Server Backup)

Here are the settings that will be configured for this backup:

  • Daily Backup
  • 1 full backup then 14 incremental backups – Windows server backup automatically handles the full and incremental backups no additional configuration is needed.
  • The backup destination will be a volume mounted as a local disk. I’m using a SAN with replication to another datacenter for disaster recovery.
  • My domain controllers are virtual running in a VMWare environment.
  • The domain controller is Windows Server 2016

Differential backups were the next step in the evolution of backup strategies. A differential backup backs up only the files that changed since the last full back.

Incremental backups also back up only the changed data, but they only back up the data that has changed since the last backup — be it a full or incremental backup.

Automate AD Backup Monitoring (Email Alerts) PowerShell scripts

The site recovery service replicates the data at secondary location as well as automates
the process of recovery of data in case of data outage. Similarly Azure backup can be used
to backing up the on premise data in clouds. Data is stored in encrypted mode in both the
cases

What should you use as the source for the inbound security rule for Azure backup?
1 Answer. Microsoft Azure Backup makes use of port 443 (Https). Azure Backup service tag can also be used when backing up locked down VMs using MARS agent however the MARS agent can only be installed on Windows machines. So, backing up Linux Azure VMs with MARS agent is not supported as of now.