The Active Directory and Windows System State backups are very similar. The key components that Recovery Manager for Active Directory 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.
Recovery Manager for Active Directory 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
Recovery Manager for Active Directory Disaster Recovery Edition also supports BMR backups. With BMR backups, you can completely rebuild the server if necessary. For more details, refer Bare metal forest recovery.
Recovery Manager for Active Directory allows you to create backups of system-specific data known as the Active Directory and BMR backups. Note that Recovery Manager for Active Directory creates Active Directory backups for Active Directory domain controllers only.
NOTE |
If you are going to store backups on the Recovery Manager Console machine, check that the Administrative Share "DriveLetter$" exists and is accessible on this host. Otherwise, the backup operation will fail. For more information, see Installing Backup Agent automatically. |
You can use Computer Collections to create backups for multiple computers. For more information, see Using Computer Collections.
NOTE |
When the backup is triggered and any specified backup path is not available, no backup is created, neither in the DC storage nor in the Console storage. The backup creation session will fail. |
In the console tree, select a Computer Collection, and then click Create Backup on the Action menu.
If prompted, confirm the operation.
You can also use the Backup Wizard to start a backup job:
In the console tree, click the root node, and then click Create Backup on the Action menu.
Follow the instructions in the Backup Wizard.
On the When to Back Up page click Now, and then click Next.
Click Advanced to view backup options. You can modify the options as needed. When finished, click OK to close the Properties dialog box.
Click Finish to start the backup job.
Note |
By default, the wizard uses the default settings. You can view and modify the default settings using the Collection Defaults command that appears on the Action menu when you select the Computer Collections node in the console tree. |
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:
In the console tree, click Sessions.
In the details pane, click the backup-creation session, and then click Properties on the Action menu.
In the Properties dialog box, click the Progress tab, and examine the displayed information.
By clicking Abort on the Progress tab, you can stop the selected session.
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.
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
.
Create a computer collection.
Right-click the computer collection, and then click Properties to open the Computer Collection Properties dialog box.
On the Agent Settings tab, select the option Use the following account to access Backup Agent and specify account credentials. In Recovery Manager for Active Directory, 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 DC Storage tab. For more details, see Usage of backup access credentials.
On the DC 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%
.
On the Backup tab, select the Full (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. |
NOTE |
Now only system critical volumes are included in the BMR backup by default, e.g. Active Directory database volume, SYSVOL volume, OS volume, etc. |
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\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.
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.
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