Having a bad day?

You know… the kind of day where all of the hard drives fail on one of your domain controllers, and then the new sysadmin runs a script on your production AD environment that deletes all user accounts, and then a hurricane hits your backup datacenter and floods your server room, submerging the last few backup servers you had left?

I hate it when that happens…

Fortunately, the Planning for Active Directory Forest Recovery guide has been updated to cover AD environments with Windows Server 2008.

This guide contains best-practice recommendations for recovering an Active Directory forest, if forest-wide failure has rendered all domain controllers in the forest incapable of functioning normally. The procedure steps in this guide, which you must customize for your particular environment, describe how to recover the entire Active Directory forest to a point in time before the critical malfunction. They also ensure that none of the restored domain controllers replicates from a domain controller with potentially dangerous data. The procedures apply to Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) in Windows Server 2008 and the Active Directory® directory service in Windows Server 2003.

The time to plan for disaster is BEFORE it happens.  Read through the guide, build a solid backup plan (including offsite backups), and practice the disaster recover process often enough that you know what to do when a real disaster strikes.

Download the guide here: https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=326c8a7a-dcad-4333-9050-a6303ff3155c#tm