Recovery Manager for AD Disaster Recovery Edition 10.3 - User Guide

Backing up data

• Permissions required for the Backup operation

• Managing Backup Agent

• Using a least-privileged user account to back up data

• Using Managed Service Accounts

• Active Directory backups vs Windows System State backups

• Creating BMR and Active Directory backups

• Retrying backup creation

• Enabling backup encryption

• Backing up AD LDS (ADAM)

• Backing up cross-domain group membership

• Backing up distributed file system (DFS) data

• Backup scheduling

• Setting performance options

• Setting advanced backup options

• Using Forest Recovery Agent

• Unpacking backups

• Using e-mail notification

• Viewing backup creation results

Permissions required for the Backup operation

The table below lists the minimum user account permissions required to perform the Backup operation.

Minimum permissions required for the Backup operation

Backing up the AD data using the preinstalled Backup Agent

Membership in the RMAD Backup Operators group.

-OR-

Builtin\Backup Operators domain local group.

Create the RMAD Backup Operators group before the Backup Agent installation. For more details, refer to Using a least-privileged user account to back up data.

If the Ensure Forest Recovery Agent is deployed check box is selected on the Agent Settings tab of the backup collection Properties, the account must be added to the Builtin\Administrators domain local group.

Backing up the AD data using the automatically installed Backup Agent

Membership in the Builtin\Administrators domain local group.

This operation is always performed under the Recovery Manager Console account.

Installing the Backup Agent

Membership in the Builtin\Administrators domain local group.

-OR-

Domain Admins group.

Managing Backup Agent

Recovery Manager for Active Directory (RMAD) employs a Backup Agent to back up data on domain controllers and AD LDS (ADAM) hosts added to Computer Collections. For this reason, the Backup Agent must be installed on each computer where you plan to back up data by using RMAD.

For each Computer Collection, you can specify whether you want to use only preinstalled instances of Backup Agent or want to automatically install Backup Agent when necessary. You can configure RMAD in one of the following ways:

• Use preinstalled Backup Agent only. When configured this way, RMAD will only use the Backup Agent you manually preinstalled on the computers in the Computer Collection.

• Use preinstalled Backup Agent and automatically install the agent when necessary. With this method, RMAD will use preinstalled Backup Agent if it is present on the target computer. If the Backup Agent is missing, RMAD will automatically install it before backing up data on the target computer, and then will automatically remove the automatically installed agent upon the backup operation completion.

You can specify one of these methods in the Computer Collection properties. For more information, see Agent Settings tab subsection in Properties for an existing Computer Collection.

In this section:

• Installing Backup Agent automatically

• Preinstalling Backup Agent manually

• Discovering preinstalled Backup Agent

• Updating Backup Agent information

• Upgrading Backup Agent

• Uninstalling Backup Agent

• Removing a Backup Agent entry from the Backup Agent Management node

Installing Backup Agent automatically

You can configure Recovery Manager for Active Directory (RMAD) to automatically install the Backup Agent on each computer (domain controller and AD LDS (ADAM) host) added to a particular Computer Collection. After you do so, RMAD will automatically install the Backup Agent before backing up a computer where the agent is not preinstalled. When the backup operation completes, RMAD will remove the automatically installed Backup Agent.

If the Backup Agent is already preinstalled on the target computer to be backed up, RMAD does not automatically deploy the agent and uses the preinstalled agent instead.

For RMAD to automatically install the Backup Agent, the user account under which RMAD accesses the target Computer Collection must have specific permissions. For more information, see Permissions required to use Recovery Manager for Active Directory.

• Windows Server automatically creates Administrative Shares. If the automatic creation of shares was disabled (Microsoft KB Article 954422), re-enable the automatic shares creation.

• Check that Administrative Shares are accessible. For details, see Shared Folders in Microsoft documentation.

To install the Backup Agent automatically

1. In the Recovery Manager Console tree, expand the Computer Collections node.

2. Locate the Computer Collection that holds the computers on which you want to automatically install the Backup Agent.

3. Right-click the Computer Collection, and then click Properties.

4. On the Agent Settings tab, make sure that the Use preinstalled Backup Agent check box is cleared.

   For more information about this check box, see Agent Settings tab subsection in Properties for an existing Computer Collection.

5. Click OK to close the dialog box.