We've been using Win2008R2's AD
Snapshot feature to perform a nightly backup of our AD
domain. I'm trying to figure out the steps that I need to run through to use one of these nightly backups to restore our AD
domain on a 2nd server.
These are the commands we used to backup the AD DOM
:
1. create a new snapshot
echo **** create a new snapshot **** >> %LOG% 2>>&1
ntdsutil snapshot "activate instance ntds" create quit quit >> %LOG% 2>>&1
2. mount the snapshot
echo **** mount the new snapshot **** >> %LOG% 2>>&1
ntdsutil snapshot "list all" "mount 1" quit quit >> %LOG% 2>>&1
3. copy NTDS snapshot to backup dir
echo **** backup the snapshot files **** >> %LOG% 2>>&1
c:
cd "\*SNAP*\WINDOWS\NTDS"
robocopy . "%BUDIR%" /E /Z /NFL /NDL /R:3 /LOG+:"%LOG%"
What I'm trying to figure out is how do I use ntdsutil
to mount/restore this AD
snapshot on a 2nd computer so that it's now our Master AD
server.
EDIT #1
After more digging it doesn't look like @Greg Askew's method of Installing from Media (IFM) will work for us. I should've mentioned this in the original question, but didn't realize it mattered. We're attempting to create a backup of our existing primary AD DS
and would like to be able to restore this to a 2nd server as part of our Disaster Recovery
(DR) process. According to this blog:
... is a fast and efficient way to re-install a domain controller and get it up to sync, (that’s the proper way to handle a faulting replicas/domain controllers in most cases). There is some common misunderstandings of the concept “Install from media” I terms of if the operation could be performed entirely offline or online, the short answer is: No. It can’t be performed offline; you have to be online with at least one writable domain controller in the same domain as the IFM source is taken from and even then you may not be able to be fully efficient and cause replication to happen ...
It doesn't look like you can use the IFM
method to restore the first server in the domain. One already has to be in the domain. So IFM
is only an option for doing "online" restores, not "offline" such is our case.