Active Directory Data Corruption

Hi,

One of the reasons given to have a a current, verified and reliable System State Backup was, to restore Active Directory data that becomes 'Corrupted'.

I wasn't sure if I knew what Data Corruption was, and did a Google search, and from what wikipedia says,

"Data corruption refers to errors in computer data that occur during transmission or retrieval, introducing unintended changes to the original data".

Courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_corruption


What could cause AD Data to become corrupted, say when Replication happens? Say, for discussion, somehow data gets corrupted during Replication, doesn't the 'checksum' value would tell the Replication Partner of data corruption?

Or

Can AD Data become corrupted even when there is no Replication? If so, what event[s] could cause such a result?

I can picture Packets being lost in the transmission, but since TCP is used as the Protocol for Replication, isn't there a re-transmission of lost packets.

Thanks

A more common fault with AD is not data corruption per-say but something like a corrupted schema.

When you install network services some of them update the AD's schema - live communications service is a prime example of this, occaisonaly the schema can become corrupted.

The problem is when the schema goes tit's up the AD is completley buggered!

It's very easy to back up the AD from DC's though by running the 'ntbackup' utility from the command prompt :D

If data became corrupt on a DC on say a hard drive surface level then this would only affect that DC and would not be replicated - well it may be replicated but other DC's would not use it to update anything as it wouldn't make sense.

Quote:

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Originally posted here by Nokia

It's very easy to back up the AD from DC's though by running the 'ntbackup' utility from the command prompt :D

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Nokia, Thankyou for your explanation.

If the DC is also hosting DNS and AD-Integrated, does the System State Backup include the DNS Zone Data? The reason I ask this question is, when I read what System State would include, no where I saw anything about DNS Zone Data.

Or is the DNS Zone Data, part of the AD database [Ntds.dit] in the System State? If it is not, how would I back up the DNS Zone data?

In What Partition of the DC does the DNS Zone data stored? Is it domain directory partition or application directory partition?

Thanks