This tutorial teaches you how to backup your Active Directory and DNS server using NTBackup, a free and included utility with Windows Server.


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Video Transcription

Hello everyone, today’s tutorial is going to be, How to backup Active Directory with NTBackup. We briefly go over active directory and the files use, and then we will start the video. Active directory use the following files, NTDS.dit. This is your database file. Edb.chk, this is your check point file. Edb*.log, this is your transaction logs, each about 10megabytes in size. Res1.log and Res2.log, and these are your reserve transactions logs. Active directory by defaults stores all these files in the default location of the C:\WINDOWS\NTDS if you are curios. Okay? So now we went over that, let us go ahead and take a look at the video. And we will go ahead and get started now. First, go ahead and click on the start button and then Run, this will open the Run dialogue box. Type NTBackup and then hit okay. This will launch the empty backup application and you can click on the Backup Wizard button or you can click on Tools and then Backup Wizard. Now here is the Backup Wizard, go and click Next, then what we want today is select only backup the system state data. And click Next. Here, you will select the location to save your files. Let us go ahead and make a folder and location for this back up. So let us go to the E drive and we will create a new folder in this directory. We will call it Systems date backup, so just remember this location. So it is E:\System\State|backup or uses that only at here. So let us click on browse and then browse the location, system state backup. Then we will go ahead into a file name for this backup. System State Backup and we will give it today’s date. So, 03.21.08 and then click on the save button, now we are ready to go. Click Next and click Finish. Now, if you want to click on the Advanced button, you can configure a schedule for this. So you can do daily, weekly or monthly reoccurring backups that will be automated for you. But for this video tutorial, we are just going to do a one time backup. So you will see here now, all the files are being copied and it gives you an elapse time and estimated remaining time. How many files are being processed? Let us go ahead and look at this, and it takes about 4 to 5 minutes on our server here. It is a test server so, this might vary, depending on how many files you have and how much is the back up. So once this is done, it will give you a finish box, dialogue box with two options, close or report. So see that in a second. So we want to do is click on the report button. This will show you a report of a job, or a job report. So here we have what was copied, how much that was copied, the start, time and end time. And that is pretty much it. So go ahead and get close. We will X it out of the back- empty backup and then just check the location. And see if the file is saved correctly. Here we have the E:\ system state backup about 700 megabytes in size. So that is pretty much it for this tutorial. If you like to see other IT tutorials, please visit http://www.nichiai.com/tutorials for full resolutions videos. Thank you very much.