NTFS Partitions and Backing Up

[themistry]

Hello all,

Little quandry for you. I have user profiles stored on my Win2k3 server. I would like to back these up onto an external drive.

Now, when I back them up, I presume they will be backed up using the NTFS permissions they are set with. If not, please let me know.

Now my question, if my PDC blows up, and I am forced to create a new installation of windows, will my backups be useless, as without the original PDC to authenticate against, I wont be able to access the backed up files?

Whats the typical way around this? I would like to be able to take the backup drive, connect it to a seperate machine and have access to everything (should the PDC fail, people can still access work).

Im not in a corporate environment, strict policy does not interest me here (i know what I want todo is bad). However for my purposes, it is ideal. So how should I do it?

Any help guys and gals?

Thanks all!
TM

 

[themistry]

Hi Matja,

thanks for your help this far.

So, could I use the system state backup to move my AD from my exisiting server to a new server I am building to replace it?

Any advice on this. My currently windows install is stilling on a RAID 1 mirror (hardware raid).

Thanks
TM

 

[themistry]

Yes - restoring from the 'System State' backup should be fine, so long as you keep them on seperate networks if they're likely to be on at the same time - because they'll have the same name, and that'll really freak Windows out.

If you want to just clone the Active Directory settings onto a new server while the two servers are running, better would be just to add it as a member server and make sure the Global Catalogue is replicated onto the new server (Active Directory Sites and Services -> Sites -> Default-First-Site-Name -> Servers -> [servername] -> NTDS Settings -> properties), and then remove the original server.

Hi Matja,

thanks so much for this reply. I actually want to maintain my server name so the second option may not be the best. However restoring the system state is perfect, im glad this will take across the users, settings and most importantly the domain information.

Perfect!

Thanks again,
TM