Bare Metal Restore: The Full Procedure
The disaster: someone deleted the entire VM. Or the OS volume corrupted. Or a ransomware event encrypted the host. The procedure now is to bare-metal restore from the backup we…
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IT professional writing about cybersecurity, cloud & DevOps, automation, networking, and systems administration. Real-world guides for real-world problems.
Latest Articles
Bare Metal Backup Test on a VM (Prove the Backup Actually Restores)
An untested backup is not a backup. This post is the test. We’ll create a bare-metal backup of a disposable lab VM — not just system state, but the full…
Schedule Automatic Backup in Windows Server 2022
Manual backups are practice. Scheduled backups are what actually saves you when a DC dies at 3 AM. Part 1 covered the one-shot system state backup; this post automates the…
Backup the Active Directory Database (System State + wbadmin)
If you only ever do one Active Directory backup, it’s the system state backup. System state pulls everything AD needs to come back from scratch — the NTDS.DIT database, SYSVOL,…
repadmin /replsummary: Decode Your Active Directory Replication Health
repadmin /replsummary is the single most useful command for telling you whether AD replication is healthy. One terminal, one keystroke, two columns of numbers that immediately surface every DC that’s…
The Concept of Lingering Objects in Active Directory (Causes, Detection, Cleanup)
A lingering object is a deleted AD object that didn’t get the “you’re deleted” memo before the memo itself expired. It sits on a long-disconnected DC, pretending to still be…
How Active Directory Replication Conflicts Are Resolved (Version, Timestamp, GUID)
Multi-master replication doesn’t prevent conflicts — it tolerates them. Two admins on two DCs can simultaneously edit the same attribute, create the same object, or move and delete things at…
Understanding the AD Replication Bridgehead Server (Selection, Failover, Pitfalls)
If every DC in every site talked directly to every DC in every other site, an N-site forest with M DCs per site would have N×M×(N-1)×M long-distance connections — explosive…