Chapter 13. Backup, Recovery, and Maintenance

A very important though often overlooked aspect of maintaining Active Directory is having a solid disaster recovery plan in place. While the reported incidents of corruption of Active Directory have been minimal, it has happened and is something you should be prepared for regardless of how unlikely it is to occur. Restoring accidentally deleted objects is much more likely to happen than complete corruption, and thus you should be equally prepared. Do you have a plan in place for what to do if a domain controller that has a FSMO role suddenly goes offline, and you are unable to bring it back? All the scenarios we've just described typically happen under times of duress. That is, clients are complaining or an application is no longer working correctly and people aren't happy. It is during times like this that you don't want to have to scramble to find a solution. Having well-documented procedures to handle these issues is critical.

In this chapter, we will look at how to prepare for failures by backing up Active Directory. We will then describe how you can recover all or portions of your Active Directory from backup. We will then cover how to recover from FSMO failures. Finally, we will look at other preventive maintenance operations you can do to ensure the health of Active Directory.