Active Directory

The Active Directory iDataAgent provides granular backup and restore of individual Active Directory attributes.

Key Features

Comprehensive Data Protection and Recovery

The Active Directory iDataAgent along with the Windows File System iDataAgent provides complete data protection for a domain controller and other computers in a domain.

Automatic Discovery of Applications

You can use the Auto discover applications option to automatically find Active Directory applications in your environment and install software to back up the Active Directory applications. For more information, see Automatic Discovery of Applications.

Efficient Job Management and Reporting

You can view and verify the status of the backup and recovery operations from the Job Controller and Event Viewer windows within the CommCell Console. You can also track the status of the jobs using reports, which can be saved and easily distributed. Reports can be generated for different aspects of data management. You also have the flexibility to customize the reports to display only the required data and save them to any specified location in different formats. For example, you can create a backup job summary report to view at-a-glance the completed backup jobs. In addition, you can also schedule these reports to be generated and send them on email without user intervention.

Backup and Recovery Failovers

In the event that a MediaAgent used for the backup or recovery operation fails, it is automatically resumed on alternate MediaAgents. In such cases, the backup or restore job will not restart from the beginning, but will resume from the point of failure. This is especially useful for backups and restores on large directory server databases.

In the event, that a network goes down, the backup and recovery jobs are resumed on alternate data paths. Similarly, in the event of a device failure, the jobs are automatically switched to alternate disk and tape drives.

Deduplication

Deduplication provides a smarter way of storing data by identifying and eliminating the duplicate items in a data protection operation.

Deduplication at the data block level compares blocks of data against each other. If an object (file, database, etc.) contains blocks of data that are identical to each other, then block level deduplication eliminates storing the redundant data and reduces the size of the object in storage. This way dramatically reduces the backup data copies on both the disk and tapes.

Add-On Component

Offline Mining

The Active Directory Offline Mining enables you to browse multiple versions of the directory server database from different points in time. This is useful if you want to compare different versions of a single object or attribute. The value of each attribute is visible in the offline copy, which allows you to easily compare attributes and recover the exact version you need.

Terminology

The Active Directory documentation uses the following terminology: