AD maintains a multi-master database. Like any other database, there can be data corruptions, crashes, data loss, and so on. In my entire career, I still haven't come across a situation where a full database recovery is required in a production environment. The reason is that an AD DS database keeps replicating to other available DCs and it is very rare that all the available DCs crash at the same time and lose data. Unlike other AD issues, there aren't many options for AD DS database troubleshooting.
In the following table, I have listed a few options that can cause AD DS database-related issues:
|
Issue |
Description |
|
Hardware failure |
The AD database is located in C:\Windows\NTDS. This path can be changed, but it cannot be hosted on separate systems. If there is any hardware failure, we will lose the database... |
