Backup of Active Directory takes much longer than expected (4044229)

Title: Backup of Active Directory takes much longer than expected

Date: Oct 07
Product & Version: N/A
Module & Version: File system
OS Version: Windows
Application version: Active Directory

Description: This document discusses the reason for a File System backup of an Active Directory server taking much longer than expected.

Symptoms:

A file system backup of an Active Directory server takes much longer than expected.

Trace from the File System plugin will show a significant amount of time building the tree which will most likely consist of many encrypted files. This period is delimited by the following two lines in a binary log:
Job Message 2007/09/26 09:49:42 1305 Data Plugin MSERV The SYSVOL files are being included in this backup
Job Message 2007/09/26 10:04:03 1305 Data Plugin MSERV Starting Backup
In this instance it is approximately 12 minutes.

Another significant amount of time will then be spent backing up the tree built previously. As there are many encrypted files this takes much longer than it would normally. In the example this takes approx 40 minutes (the time from the 2nd line above to the time shown in the 1st line below is approx 40 minutes).

Then the active directory element is backed up which takes just a few seconds and then the job completes:
Job Message 2007/09/26 10:47:20 1305 Data Plugin MSERV Backing up the Active Directory
Job Message 2007/09/26 10:48:07 1305 Jobs Netvault Finished job 1305, phase 1 (instance 1)