Preface

Murphy's Law states that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. In relation to Information Systems and Technology, this could mean an incident that completely destroys data, slows down productivity, or causes any other major interruption to your operations or your business. How bad can it get?—"Most large companies spend between 2% and 4% of their IT budget on disaster recovery planning; this is intended to avoid larger losses. Of companies that had a major loss of computerized data, 43% never reopen, 51% close within two years, and only 6% will survive long-term." Hoffer, Jim." Backing Up Business - Industry Trend or Event.

Active Directory (AD) is a great system but it is also very delicate. If you encounter a problem, you will need to know how to recover from it as quickly and completely as possible. You will need to know about Disaster Recovery and be prepared with a business continuity plan. If Active Directory is a part of the backbone of your network and infrastructure, the guide to bring it back online in case of an incident needs to be as clear and concise as possible. If it happens or if you want to avoid all of this happening, this is the book for you.

Recovering Active Directory from any kind of disaster is trickier than most people think. If you do not understand the processes associated with recovery, you can cause more damage than you fix.

This is why you need this book. This book has a unique approach - the first half of the book focuses on planning and shows you how to configure your AD to be resilient. The second half of the book is response-focused and is meant as a reference where we discuss different disaster scenarios and how to recover from them. We follow a Symptom-Cause- Recovery approach - so all you have to do is follow along and get back on track.

This book describes the most common disaster scenarios and how to properly recover your infrastructure from them. It contains commands and steps for each process, and also contains information on how to plan for disaster and how to leverage technologies in your favour in the event of a disaster.

You will encounter the following types of disaster or incident in this book, and learn how to recover from each of them.

• Recovery of deleted objects

• Single domain controller hardware failure

• Single domain controller AD corruption

• Site AD corruption

• Site hardware failure

• Corporate AD corruption

• Complete corporate hardware failure

What This Book Covers

Chapter 1 provides an Overview of Active Directory Disaster Recovery.

Chapter 2 discusses some of the key elements in Active Directory and then over to the actual design work. A few design models are dissected, which will give you a good starting point for your own design.

Chapter 3 takes a look at all the steps and processes you should go through in order to have a DRP successfully implemented.

Chapter 4 discusses directly (implementations) and indirectly (processes) related subjects that will help you make your AD environment stronger against events that can impact in a negative way.

Chapter 5 looks at the different options and approaches for how to recover a DC that has a database corruption.

Chapter 6 takes a look at the steps necessary to completely recover from a failed domain controller.

Chapter 7 goes through the different methods of restoring deleted objects, and also looks at how to minimize the impact that such a deletion can have on your business.

Chapter 8 provides a step-by-step guide to forest recovery.

Chapter 9 discusses site AD infrastructure failure.

Chapter 10 describes through a few tools and utilities that will help you monitor and diagnose your AD.

Appendix A provides an example of Business Continuity plan.

Bibliography

What you need for this book

This book is oriented towards Windows 2003 Server R2 and Active Directory used in that release. Notes identify where commands vary from older Windows 2003 versions, and provide the equivalent commands in these older versions. As Microsoft is phasing out Windows 2000, we are omitting it entirely. However, the disaster recovery guidelines outlined in this book are applicable to any Active Directory environment, because they haven't changed that much. Please note that in order to get the most out of this book you should be running Windows 2003.

Conventions

In this book you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Any command-line input and output is written as follows:

>seize domain naming master
>seize schema master
>seize infrastructure master
>seize pdc

New terms and important words are introduced in a bold-type font. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear as follows: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".

Note

Warnings or important notes appear like this.

Note

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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