System State

  • Thread starter Thread starter Michael Hanratty
  • Start date Start date
M

Michael Hanratty

Hi,
I perform a weekly state backup of both my domain controllers.
Each domain controller is now producing a 400Mb file .bkf file

This won't fit onto the one cd and I then decided to rar both files
together which produced a 197Mb file (great :-) I thought)

I'm just wondering if any of you would disagree with this method of
active directory backup due to the compression.

I'm also wondering if the 400Mb file size is normal, we have a 400 user
network with about 30 OU's.

TIA
Michael
 
Andrei Ungureanu said:
it's big for only 400 users ... but this is no problem .. you can do an
offline defrag of the database
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/232122
Click to expand...

Actually it's not a large system state (these days) for
400 users and probably would be the same size for
40 or for 2000 users.

The reason it would change (much) is that the default
AD is 10 MB which will hold around 2000 users without
increase and leave a bit of room for other objects.

Looking at this we see that the AD itself is only a small
part (probably about 70-100 MB) of the System State.

My Servers on small to medium domains ran 300-350
for a long time but as you add services, and probably
more important, SERVICE PACKS the required backup
grows since the service cache grows.
 
sorry .. I haven't see that is a BKF file ... I thought it was talking about
NTDS.DIT
 
Andrei Ungureanu said:
sorry .. I haven't see that is a BKF file ... I thought it was talking about
NTDS.DIT
Click to expand...

Well, backing up the NTDS.dit file alone is insufficient.

A System State backup includes all of the AD files but
the critical services and drivers plus the registry and bit
of other stuff.

It's mostly the services that account for the growing size.

AD itself, the whole file set, is less than 100 MB until
you add a LOT of users.

--
Herb Martin

 
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