Software Installation and Maintenance and Backing Up Data

Back up any software distribution points that you create to manage the deployment of software, packages, and customizations. Software installation and maintenance relies on Group Policy, and software installation and maintenance and Group Policy store information in both Active Directory and the sysvol.

Backup both Active Directory and sysvol immediately after making changes to software installation and maintenance to maintain version compatibility. For example, if you publish a new application without backing up and then you have to restore Active Directory and sysvol with a backup that does not have the published application, any users who installed the published application are installing the old application in an unmanaged state. The best way to prevent this is to keep current backups.

If you do not receive the data that you expected when restoring a backup, verify that you have the correct administrative permissions.

Important

If you use the built-in administrators account on a domain controller, the backup and restore operation does not work correctly. Domain Administrators or equivalent access is required to back up. The built-in Administrators group does not have the same inherited permissions on Group Policy objects as it does for the rest of the domain server namespace. In a standard configuration, the access control list (ACL) set on the Policies container does not inherit from its parent.

For more information about backing up and restoring data in Active Directory, see "Active Directory Backup and Restore" in this book. For more information about the tools required for backing up data, see "Backup" in the Microsoft ® Windows ®  2000 Server Resource Kit Server Operations Guide .