Recovering the Active Directory data from a single-pass backup

This method of recovering the data can be used regardless of whether the domain has other domain controllers.

This section describes only the steps and settings that are specific for recovering Active Directory data from a single-pass backup. The common settings of a recovery task are described in the "Creating a recovery task" section.

Extracting the Active Directory data

On the Recover data page:

1. Under What to recover, click Select data. Select the data and the recovery point.

   Warning  If the domain has two or more domain controllers, select a recovery point that is not older than the tombstone lifetime. Otherwise, replication issues may occur.

2. If the console is connected to the management server, select a registered machine where Agent for Active Directory is installed. Otherwise, skip this step.
3. Click Destination and select a local or network folder to extract the Microsoft Active Directory data as files to. The database files and the SYSVOL folder will be recovered with recreating a full path.
4. In Overwriting, choose whether to overwrite an existing file with the same name as in the archive.
5. Specify other settings of the recovery task as appropriate.
6. Run the recovery task and wait until it is completed.

Replacing the Active Directory data with the extracted files

1. Restart the domain controller and press F8 during startup.
2. On the Advanced Boot Options screen, select Directory Services Restore Mode.
3. [Optional] Create a copy of the current Active Directory database files in case the changes need to be undone.
4. Move the extracted Active Directory data to its original location:
   1. Navigate to the folder with the extracted data. This folder contains one or more folders. The names of these folders contain drive letters of the disks that contained the backed-up Active Directory data. For example, Drive(C).
   2. Copy all of the contents from each of these folders to the root of the corresponding disk drive. For example, copy the contents from the Drive(C) folder to C:/ and from the Drive(E) folder to E:/. Choose to overwrite the files, if prompted.

Completing the recovery

1. If the domain has only one domain controller, skip this step. Otherwise, do one of the following:
   • If you want to recover the entire Active Directory database, perform steps 3–8 described under "USN rollback" in the "Avoiding a USN rollback" section.
   • If you want to recover individual objects, such as an unintentionally deleted user account or computer account, perform steps 2–4 described in the "Restoring accidentally deleted information" section.
2. Restart the domain controller in normal mode.
3. Ensure that the Active Directory service has started successfully.