Perform an Authoritative Restore of Active Directory Objects
This is the hands-on authoritative restore walkthrough — the procedure Part 5 set up conceptually. We simulate a real disaster: an OU with users is deleted from DC01, the deletion…
Tag: Disaster Recovery
Non-Authoritative vs Authoritative Restore in Active Directory
Restoring a Domain Controller has two flavours. They use the same backup, the same DSRM boot path, the same wbadmin command — but a single decision afterward changes the entire…
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…
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,…
SQL Server FCI Part 8 of 13: Testing the Failover (Break Things on Purpose)
Eight parts of work get tested in 30 seconds. We create some baseline data on the active node, kill the active node hard, watch the cluster move SQL to the…
Hyper-V Replica Unplanned Failover: The Emergency Button (Part 4 of 4)
The primary host is gone. Power outage, hardware failure, ransomware that took out the SAN, fire in the rack — doesn’t matter what; the workload is down and the primary…
Hyper-V Replica Planned Failover: Zero Data Loss Handover With Auto-Reverse
You set up Hyper-V Replica in Part 1 and proved it works via a quarterly drill in Part 2. Now the moment comes: you actually need to move the workload…
Hyper-V Replica Test Failover: A Safe DR Drill With No Production Impact
You stood up Hyper-V Replica in Part 1. Bytes are flowing from the primary host to the replica host every five minutes. The replica VM exists on HVHost02 in a…
Hyper-V Replica in a Domain: Kerberos Setup, Walked End-to-End
Hyper-V Replica is the built-in DR layer in every Hyper-V install. Configure it once and Hyper-V asynchronously copies a VM’s disks to a second standalone host every few minutes; if…
Hyper-V Replica in a Workgroup: Self-Signed Cert Setup End-to-End
Hyper-V Replica is the built-in disaster-recovery layer that ships with every Hyper-V install. It asynchronously copies a VM’s disks (and optionally point-in-time snapshots) to a second standalone Hyper-V host so…