AD Authoritative or Non-Authoritative Restore

derkit

Hi all,

I have to say this is a great and active forum - I've been reading for ages, but so far have neither had anything to add to the posts, nor the time unfortunately - I hope to change that in the future!

I'm currently trying to get my head around authoritative and non-authoritative restore - I understand the actual differences but am left with the question - when would you use a non-authoritative restore?

I understand an authoritative restore is where you need to restore and tell the other DCs to accept this restore by raising the USN, but why and when would you use a non-auth. restore? The only thought I've had is that its to get a DC up to speed quicker than allowing a fellow DC to do a mass-replication from scratch onto it??

Any help appreciated

Asif Dasl

If you've got a large AD and you've setup a new site then you would take a backup of AD to the new site and do a non-authoritative restore and then replication will catch up with the new changes since the backup was taken - it reduces the amount of traffic across the WAN.

derkit

Thanks for the info - I thought it was something like that, nice to have it confirmed by someone in the know