This guide contains best-practice recommendations for recovering an Active Directory® forest if forest-wide failure renders all domain controllers in the forest incapable of functioning normally. The steps it contains serve as a template for your forest recovery plan, which you can customize for your particular environment. These steps apply to domain controllers that run Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Server, Windows Server® 2003, or Windows Server 2008 operating systems.
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| In Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003, the directory service is named Active Directory. In Windows Server 2008, the directory service is named Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS). The rest of this guide refers to AD DS, but the steps are also applicable to Active Directory. |
To download Planning for Active Directory Forest Recovery as a printable .doc file, see Planning for Active Directory Forest Recovery (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=152459).
Publication and revision history
The following table summarizes the revision history for this guide, including its original publication on Microsoft TechNet.
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Date
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Revision
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October 2006
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Original publication on Technet
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May2009
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An additional instance of this guide was published in the Windows Server 2008 Technical Library. The guidelines were also updated to reflect new functionality for Windows Server 2008, including the following:
- In Deciding When to Perform Forest Recovery and Recovering Your Active Directory Forest, added information about how read-only domain controllers (RODCs) can help to maintain business continuity during the forest recovery process.
- In the section “Determining which backups to use,” added information about using the Active Directory Database Mounting Tool (Dsamain.exe) and the ntdsutil snapshot command.
- In the section “Recovery Roadmap,” added information about a new method for creating installation media for install from media (IFM) operations by using the ntdsutil ifm command.
- In the sections “Restore the first domain controller for the forest root domain” and “Restore the first domain controller in each of the remaining domains,” added information about how to perform the restore on a domain controller that runs Windows Server 2008, including how to perform an authoritative restore of SYSVOL, and how to perform metadata cleanup more simply by using the version of Active Directory Users and Computers that is included with Windows Server 2008.
- In the section “Recover additional domain controllers in the forest by installing AD DS,” added information about the Source Domain Controller page that appears in the Active Directory Domain Services Installation Wizard.
- In Appendix A: Forest Recovery Procedures, added information about new methods in Windows Server 2008 for performing backup and restore, metadata cleanup, and deleting a domain controller object.
- In Appendix B: Frequently Asked Questions, added information about new functionality provided in Windows Server 2008 and a new method for performing an integrity check and checksum verification on a domain controller that runs Windows Server 2008 by stopping AD DS and using the ntdsutil command.
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