Chapter 8. Maintaining the Active Directory Environment

As a Microsoft Windows network professional, you are familiar with backup and recovery processes. Typically, some form of backup process occurs in an organization every day. Recovery is (hopefully) much less frequent, but you need to know exactly what to do when everyone else is panicking. It would be unprofessional to wait until Windows Server 2008 is installed and then start to draw up a backup and recovery plan.

You need to learn about Windows Server 2008 backup and recovery, including the backup of server roles, applications, the Active Directory database (Ntds.dit), Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) objects, and Group Policy objects (GPOs). You need to formulate your disaster recovery plans and carry them out on your test network before your production network is upgraded. From the point of view of the examinations, because backup and recovery are universally important and because Windows Server 2008 introduces significant changes and enhancements, these topics are likely to be extensively tested.