Recovery Manager for AD Disaster Recovery Edition 10.3 - User Guide

Active Directory backups vs Windows System State backups

The Active Directory and Windows System State backups are very similar. The key components that Recovery Manager for Active Directory (RMAD) backs up as part of the AD system state are the Registry, the NTDS.dit file, and SYSVOL.

What differences do they have?

• Windows System State backup is a full backup of the Windows operating system; Active Directory® backup contains only pieces of Active Directory® that allow you to restore the domain controller on a clean operating system.

• Windows System State backups contain more components - not all of these components are necessary for Active Directory recovery, e.g. IIS Metabase, Cluster Services, etc.

• Windows System State backup may contain viruses in the components of the operating system.

• Windows System State backups are larger than Active Directory® backups.

For the list of Windows System State backup components, see Microsoft documentation.

RMAD enables the backup and restoration of the following Active Directory® components on domain controllers:

• DIT Database

• SYSVOL

• Registry, including all registry hives and the file NTUSER.DAT

RMAD Disaster Recovery Edition also supports Bare Metal Recovery (BMR) backups. With BMR backups, you can completely rebuild the server if necessary. For more details, refer Bare metal forest recovery.

Creating BMR and Active Directory backups

Recovery Manager for Active Directory (RMAD) allows you to create backups of system-specific data known as the Active Directory® and BMR backups. Note that RMAD creates Active Directory® backups for Active Directory® domain controllers only.

You can use Computer Collections to create backups for multiple computers. For more information, see Using Computer Collections.

• Creating Active Directory backup

• Creating BMR backup

• Usage of backup access credentials

Creating Active Directory backup

To create backups of all computers in a Computer Collection

1. In the console tree, select a Computer Collection, and then click Create Backup on the Action menu.

2. If prompted, confirm the operation.

You can also use the Backup Wizard to start a backup job:

1. In the console tree, click the root node, and then click Create Backup on the Action menu.

2. Follow the instructions in the Backup Wizard.

3. On the When to Back Up page click Now, and then click Next.

4. Click Advanced to view backup options. You can modify the options as needed. When finished, click OK to close the Properties dialog box.

5. Click Finish to start the backup job.

With the Backup Wizard, backup jobs can be scheduled to run at a specific time. For more information, see Scheduling backup creation subsection of Task scheduler overview.

While a backup job is running, you can examine the progress of the operation and, if needed, stop the backup job. After a backup job is completed, you can view backup creation results:

1. In the console tree, click Sessions.

2. In the details pane, click the backup-creation session, and then click Properties on the Action menu.

3. In the Properties dialog box, click the Progress tab, and examine the displayed information.

4. By clicking Abort on the Progress tab, you can stop the selected session.

Creating BMR backup

• This feature is supported only for Windows Server 2008 R2 or higher domain controllers.

• Active Directory® does not allow using a backup whose age exceeds the Active Directory® tombstone lifetime (default is 180 days). But if there is a RMAD BMR backup that is older than 180 days and a more recent Active Directory® backup, you can successfully perform the restore operation.

• Cache and reuse the extracted WinRe images for BMR, which will reduce failures while creating ISO images from backup.
  Locate the extracted Windows imaging file WimRe.wim under \ProgramData\Cache\WinRe\10.0 folder on the RMAD machine.

• If the process of creating a Windows Server 2008 R2 BMR backup completes with the error like "The sector size of the physical disk on which the virtual disk resides is not supported.", make sure that the disk sector size on the target machine (NAS device or similar) is equal to 512 bytes.

For instance, NetApp® ONTAP® operating system uses the following command: vserver cifs options modify -file-system-sector-size 512.

To create a BMR backup

1. Create a computer collection.

2. Right-click the computer collection, and then click Properties to open the Computer Collection Properties dialog box.

3. On the Agent tab, select the option Use the following account to access Backup Agent and specify account credentials. In RMAD, this account is used both to connect to the Backup Agent and to access the backup storage if you do not specify a separate account for the backup share on the Remote Storage tab. For more details, see Usage of backup access credentials.

   

4. On the Remote Storage tab, select the option Save backups on the backed up DC or a UNC share and enter the backup path. You need to specify path to the SMB share in the following format (%DATETIME% variable is required ): \\RemoteHost\ShareName\%COMPUTERNAME%\%DATETIME%.

5. On the Backup tab, select the Bare Metal Recovery backup type. Now only system critical volumes are included in the BMR backup by default. For information on how to include additional volumes into a BMR backup, see below in this article.

   Select the Encrypt and protect backups with password option to encrypt BMR backups and protect them with a password (Recommended). This password is used to generate a passphrase with which the backup is encrypted. The password cannot be used directly to unlock the backup container *.vhd(x) file.

   IMPORTANT: If a customer restores encrypted volumes from a backup, the volumes are restored as unencrypted.

   

6. Right-click the collection node and click Create Backup.

Including additional volumes to a BMR backup

By default, only the system critical volumes are included in the BMR backup. This includes Operating System volumes and live Active Directory volumes (database, logs, sysvol), but would not include any volumes that does not contain these critical components. If you had an additional volume where you stored system state backups, or even RMAD Active Directory backups, then this volume would not be included in the BMR backup.

To include additional volume on several domain controllers

1. Create the following registry key on the selected domain controller, or check if the key already exists in the directory:

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Quest\Recovery Manager for Active Directory

2. Add the following string value under this registry key:

   Name: WindowsBackupCommandLine

   Data: wbadmin start backup -allcritical -quiet -backuptarget:"%s" -include:E:,G:

   Where "E:,G:" - drives that will be included into the BMR backup.

To include additional volume on all domain controllers

On the Recovery Manager Console machine, add the new string value under both these registry keys:

• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Quest\Recovery Manager for Active Directory

• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Quest\Recovery Manager for Active Directory

  Name: WindowsBackupCommandLine

  Data: wbadmin start backup -allcritical -quiet -backuptarget:"%s" -include:E:,G:

  Where "E:,G:" - drives that will be included into the BMR backup.