Recently I was tasked with doing an AD audit in which I ran a utility called Ping Castle which indicated that Active Directory NTDS should be backed up frequently. This would be so you can roll back AD to a consistent state should you need to recover deleted items or deleted attributes. Typically administrators would restore the entire server to a point in time, but with AD this can cause differences in AD between servers to become a problem. Having a backup of AD on all servers at the same time would be helpful in restoring AD back to a consistent state.
The process is actually very simple using ntdsutil.
Open an elevated CMD (as Administrator
ntdsutil
activate instance ntds
snapshot
create
That’s it – the manual process.
To autotmate this process Petri has a good article on the process: https://petri.com/automating-creation-active-directory-snapshots/
Basically create a batch file in your scripts folder called ad-snapshot.bat
@echo off
ntdsutil snapshot “activate instance ntds” create quit quit
exit
Use the Task Scheduler to create a job to fire this job once a week.
