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Is there a way I can download the entire Active Directory. I know I could write script to crawl each and every user's entry that are linked in the hierarchy. But that would be very inefficient. I wanted to know if there is already a neat solution for this.

Thanks.

(I would prefer a solution that could be scripted for scheduled downloads)

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The reason is that I need to download AD. I know that it can be large. But I want to build an app that create visual stats around user's hierarchical data. Do you have a solution? – bits Jul 13 '11 at 19:07
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1 Answer

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Other than enumerating all AD objects starting at the top (using a Directory searcher component of some sort), I'm not really sure how to do this programmatically...

One solution - not programming, but using an existing tool - might be Sysinternals AD Explorer which allows you to connect to an Active Directory and store a snapshot of it on disk.

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I don't know what format that snapshot is in, unfortunately - maybe you could get in touch with Mark Russinovich and ask if that format is documented / available in some form (or check it out yourself to see if you can figure it out).

Other options might be:

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Great! Looks like this might be what I need. Thanks. – bits Jul 13 '11 at 21:44
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