Acronis Backup for Windows Server Essentials - User Guide - Manual (Page 289)

289 Copyright © Acronis International GmbH, 2002-2014
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The volumes where the Active Directory database and the transaction logs (p. 283) are located
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The volume with the SYSVOL folder. The default location of this folder is %SystemRoot%\SYSVOL.
To determine the current location of this folder, examine the Sysvol value in the following
registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Netlogon\Parameters
Considerations for backup
When setting up and performing Active Directory backup, make sure that:

You perform a backup at least monthly. If your domain has only one domain controller, we
recommend creating a backup at least daily.

Your most up-to-date backup is no older than half the tombstone lifetime. Depending on the
operating system where your domain has been created, the default tombstone lifetime is 60
days or 180 days. It does not matter whether the latest backup is full or incremental; you can
perform a successful recovery from either one.

You create an additional backup upon any of the following events:

The Active Directory database and/or transaction logs were moved to a different location.

An operating system on the domain controller was upgraded, or a service pack was installed.

A hotfix that changes the Active Directory database was installed.

The tombstone lifetime was changed administratively.
The reason for this additional backup is that a successful recovery of Active Directory from the
previous backups might not be possible.
11.1.3.3 SharePoint data backup
A Microsoft SharePoint farm consists of front-end Web servers and Microsoft SQL servers.
A front-end Web server is a host where SharePoint services are running. Some front-end Web servers
may be identical to each other (for example, the front-end Web servers that run a Web server). You
do not have to back up all identical front-end Web servers but only unique ones.
To protect SharePoint databases, you need to back up all of the Microsoft SQL servers and all of the
unique Web Front End servers belonging to the farm. The backups should be done with the same
schedule. This is needed because the configuration database must be synchronized with other
databases. For example, if the content database contains the data about a site while the latest
backup of the configuration database does not, the site will be orphaned after the configuration
database is recovered.
If you have Acronis Backup Advanced, the easiest way to back up a SharePoint farm is to create a
centralized backup plan as described in the "Creating a centralized backup plan" (p. 350) section, or
use the Back up now feature as described in the "Back up now" (p. 349) section. In Acronis Backup,
you must specify the identical schedule when creating a backup plan (p. 54) for every server
belonging to the farm.
11.2 Recovering SQL Server data
In case of a disaster, you can recover an entire SQL Server by restoring all its disks from a disk backup.
If you followed the recommendations outlined in the "Backing up an application server" (p. 279)
section, all of the SQL Server services will be up and running without additional actions. The server
data will be reverted to the state that it was at the time of backup.