Imaging Active Directory with B&R 11

Hello,

I'm a little bit sceptic about the backup which is taken by Backup & Recovery 11 of my domain controller (and a second domain controller with SQL server in a seperate network).

There are many blog entries about not to take an image of an online domain controller because you can get USN Rollback, password problems, inconsistent of the Active Directory database and much more.

So, the only thing you should backup Active Directory is by Windows Server Backup as System State (or Bare-Metal which includes System State). It will save the state of the machine with Microsoft VSS.

Now, I read a whitepaper about Acronis Backup & Recovery 11 and back up domain controller. [ http://www.acronis.de/download/docs/abr11sw/ad_backup ]

I read these pages and it looks like Backup & Recovery will completly save the active directory by Microsoft VSS in a consistent state and a restore with that backups will work without any problems.

So, my question is now can I trust that Image Backup for Active Directory Domain Controllers or should I still make a system state backup and after that backup with Acronis?

EDIT: Uh, I forgot something: If I run an SQL Server on the same machine and make an image backup of it. Should Microsoft VSS make sure that SQL Server have a consistent state on the image or do I really need Acronis SQL Server Backup for that?

Thanks,

Burak