The Commvault software offers complete Active Directory (AD) forest recovery, allowing you to recover from severe AD schema corruption, ransomware attacks on domain controllers (DCs), and other issues that affect all DCs. You can use Commvault to back up the AD database on your DCs and create runbooks that orchestrate and automate full forest recovery.
Depending on the recovery scenario, Commvault supports the following recovery methods:
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Out-of-place recovery: Restore domain controllers to newly provisioned servers. Use this when the original operating system is unavailable, compromised, or no longer trusted, such as after a ransomware attack.
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In-place recovery: Restore Active Directory on the original domain controller. Use this for logical Active Directory issues such as schema corruption, database corruption, or unwanted directory changes when the operating system remains available and trusted.
Microsoft provides a detailed procedure to recover a forest in the Active Directory forest recovery guide. The procedure is comprehensive and can take days to recover an entire forest using native AD tools.
Commvault follows the Microsoft procedures for recovering a forest, while simplifying the planning and preparation. By orchestrating and automating the 50–100+ complex steps involved in a forest recovery, Commvault can reduce the time required to restore AD from days to hours. Flexible, interactive runbooks also simplify creating and regularly testing your AD disaster recovery plan.