Can i backup a windows server 2008 r2 domain controller to a usb drive?

can i backup a windows server 2008 r2 domain controller to a usb drive? I heard there may be issues if you have to recover.
Who is Participating?
I wear a lot of hats...


Tony MassaCommented:
The easy answer is yes if you're backing up to an NTFS-formatted volume.  If the backup is good, there isn't any reason to think that recovering from removable media is any more technically difficult than from any other media.

Experts Exchange Solution brought to you by

Your issues matter to us.


Start your 7-day free trial
earlyriser99Author Commented:
tmassa99....So according to your article i can but only a one time:

On the Select Destination Disk page, select where you want to store your backups. For a scheduled backup, this can be another hard drive or a network share. It cannot be an optical drive or removable media. However, you can use optical drives or removable media for backup-once backups, and these media choices provide a great choice for bare-metal backups

So am reading this right?.
No you aren't.

The only catch is if it is a scheduled backup or one that you manually run yourself.
A scheduled backup requires the USB Hard Drive to be dedicated to only that. The process will partition and format the Drive the way it wants it to be, and you have no choice in the matter.  But if you do it manually the drive can contain other data and can be reused for other backup if there is enough free space remaining on it.

To do a restore you would use the Boot Disk that the backup process would have prompted you to create.  If you did not create one at that time,...then you can boot from the original Windows Install Disk and do the same thing.  Just make sure the USB Hard Drive was plugged in before you booted up,...or sometimes the hardware won't recognize the USB Hard Drive if it is plugged in after boot up.
Because it is a DC you typically would never do a restore unless there was only one DC to begin with.   If there is more than one DC then you never do a restore.  Instead you do a Meta Data cleanup, a FSMO Role Seisure if the remain DC doesn't have the FSMO Roles,...then reinstall the DC from scratch and then run DCPromo to bring it back into the Domain as a DC and the AD Data will replicated to it from the remaining DC that is still active.   Then you can "gracefully" shift the FSMO Roles around as desired afterwards.
Active Directory

From novice to tech pro — start learning today.

Question has a verified solution.


Have a better answer? Share it in a comment.