Features and Benefits

Reduce Costs and Increase Productivity

Accurate backups and a quicker recovery enable you to reduce the time and costs associated with AD outages and reduce the impact on users throughout the organization.

Integration with Native Tools - NEW!

Recovery Manager seamlessly integrates with Active Directory Users & Computers enabling users to work with a familiar interface.

Comprehensive Recovery Options

Recovery Manager provides intuitive, wizard-based procedures for recovering Active Directory (AD). To achieve near-zero downtime when restoring data, Quest Recovery Manager offers a feature unique in the market: online, granular restore of any object in AD, including users, groups, computers, OUs, Group Policy Objects (GPOs), sites, subnets, configuration and Exchange storage groups. Individual directory objects, object attributes or the entire AD database can be restored remotely, without taking domain controllers (DCs) offline or impacting users logged on to the network. All restore operations can be performed from one central location without requiring the administrator to go to the DC.

Efficient, Flexible Backup of Active Directory

Recovery Manager provides for centralized management of System State backups for DCs. Backups can be stored in a central location, in distributed locations, or left on the DCs themselves to minimize bandwidth utilization. In addition to creating its own full and differential backups of AD, Recovery Manager can also use backups created using the Windows backup utility (.bkf files) and unpacked backups (.dit files) from third party backup products.

Create Differential Backups of Active Directory

Recovery Manager can create differential backups of AD by backing up only the changes to AD that have occurred since the last full backup. Because of the reduced size of the differential backups and the corresponding reduction in storage space, you can create more frequent backups of AD, ensuring the most recent data is always available.  

Use Third Party Active Directory Backups

Recovery Manager supports mounting an unpacked copy of the AD database, which can be extracted from most third party backup vendors or captured by Microsoft Virtual Shadow Copy Service (VSS). By allowing you to leverage your existing backup infrastructure through this capability, Recovery Manager eliminates the need for you to create duplicate backups of AD, which also decreases your storage requirements. It also speeds the recovery process; Recovery Manager allows you to use an unpacked backup, skipping the process of unpacking a large AD database.  

Comparison Reporting

Recovery Manager lets you know what has changed in AD through quick snapshot comparisons of backups with the live AD, and granular comparison of directory objects at the attribute level. Recovery Manager’s analysis and reporting engine simplifies finding what has been changed or deleted in AD, making recovery faster, more efficient, and easier to manage.

Recovery Manager enables the creation of a comparison report without actually applying changes to AD. The report shows which properties of the objects being restored would change during the operation, allowing an administrator to examine the changes in detail and decide whether to apply the changes before they are committed to the directory.

Group Policy Restore

Individual GPOs, along with links and permission settings, can be restored remotely by using a normal backup of a DC’s System State. Recovery Manager's comparison reporting lets you know what settings have changed in the GPO since the last backup, so you are aware of exactly what you are recovering before performing the operation.

Backup and Restore of AD LDS

Just as Recovery Manager supports the online restore of AD objects, it also supports the online restore of Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS) objects. You can recover AD LDS objects that were deleted or inadvertently modified—without restarting AD LDS services or interfering with its operation. Granular recovery of AD LDS objects is provided, as well as comparison reports to determine what objects and attributes have changed in an AD LDS instance since the last backup.

Support for X-64 Based Systems

To meet the needs of the growing number of organizations deploying 64-bit Windows operating systems, Recovery Manager allows administrators running 64-bit DCs to backup and recover their AD environment with Recovery Manager for Active Directory.

Scheduling Capabilities

Recovery Manager enables administrators to schedule the creation of backups during off-peak hours. This helps reduce the network load and can save many hours of an administrator's valuable time.

Scalability and Performance

Recovery Manager offers scalability and support for large, multi-domain environments. Depending on the location of DCs or other criteria established by an administrator, DCs can be logically grouped into easy-to-manage Computer Collections.

Recovery Manager sends agents to the managed DCs when creating backups. The agents compress the data to be sent over the network and create backups for multiple DCs in parallel, improving scalability and reducing network traffic.

Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007 and MOM 2005

In order to ensure that your organization is protected in the case of AD disaster, it is necessary that backups are being successfully created on DCs.  The Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007 and MOM 2005 monitors the health of backups created by Recovery Manager, raising alerts when backups fail in a central monitoring console.