About backing up Active Directory and ADAM/AD LDS
Veritas recommends that you run Active Directory and ADAM/AD LDS backups to disk storage and then copy the backups to tape. This strategy provides you with shorter backup windows and disk storage provides the most efficient method of storage for GRT-enabled backups, and the most efficient method of restore. This method also lets you administer Active Directory or ADAM/AD LDS without requiring the individual cataloging of the backed up objects and properties.
For example, if you back up to tape, you must create a temporary hard disk staging location on a local NTFS volume to restore individual items from GRT-enabled backups on tape. The data is first copied from tape to the temporary staging location before it can be restored. As such, a restore from tape takes more time. For best results, you should specifically select disk storage when you configure your GRT-enabled backup jobs.
Note: You cannot back up databases to devices that are attached to a computer on which the Remote Media Agent for Linux is installed.
Granular Recovery Technology (GRT) lets you restore individual objects and attributes from Active Directory and ADAM/AD LDS backups without performing an authoritative or non-authoritative full restore. The Granular Recovery Technology feature is enabled by default when you create a backup job. To perform a GRT-enabled backup of a Windows Server 2012 R2 Active Directory Server, you must use a Backup Exec server that runs Windows Server 2012 R2.
When you back up any Windows Active Directory or an ADAM/AD LDS directly to tape, objects and properties that are added or deleted during the backup will not match the individual objects and properties that are available for restore from the backup set. The backup of the database is a snapshot backup of the live Active Directory or ADAM/AD LDS database and the cataloging of the individual Active Directory or ADAM/AD LDS objects occurs after the snapshot is performed. Since the catalog operation catalogs objects and properties from the live Active Directory or ADAM/AD LDS database, object and property changes can occur after the snapshot was taken.
See Backing up data.
More Information