NTFS Partitions and Backing Up

themistry · 9 Mar 2007 at 10:08

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

matja · 14 Mar 2007 at 10:59

Depends on the backup program and its settings, but generally yes, the files will be copied including their ACL/ACE entries. These are lists of numerical IDs that are looked-up in the SAM database or Active Directory to find the user names, if you delete a user account or recreate a user account (say, after a fresh install) they will be different. You can still access the files as an Administrator user, just go into the security properties dialog of the file/folders, change the owner to Adminstrator, then configure the permissions how you want.

Its a good idea to backup Active Directory, so you keep the SAM ID -> user name mappings and various other crazy stuff.

ntbackup.exe can backup the 'System State' to a single file, comprising the registry, active directory, user database, various system files etc. You can automate this via Task Scheduler. You can import this later when doing a restore.

note: Since Windows 2000 server, there is no strict concept of a 'PDC', all domain controllers are now member servers, with no master/primary. Changes to one will automatically synchronise to the other member servers via LDAP.

themistry · 14 Mar 2007 at 11:16

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

matja · 14 Mar 2007 at 12:01

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.

themistry · 16 Mar 2007 at 16:00

matja said:
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