Backup order for domain controllers and exchange.

[JosueM]

Good day everyone, we have 3 domain controller win2008r2 and 1 exchange 2010. all 3 DC are global catalog and one of them is on a remote site.

I've read the whitepaper about backup/restore AD and many posts in the forum but still have no clear the following:
1. what order should the backup be done?
2. whitepaper says one job per DC but not chain the jobs. so what would be time difference suggestion for each job ?
3. exchange backup usually takes about 2 hours because is a big server 2.5TB so I guess the exchange backup should be done after DCs backup.

Thanks in advance.

[DGrinev]

Hi Josue,

1,2. Domain controller syncs data across all servers, so you can back up only one server. Also, I'd recommend you to review our best practices related to AD.
3. That's correct, you should back up DC first.

The important thing is to enable Application aware processing in the both jobs to get consistent backups.
Please review existing discussion for additional information. Thanks!

[JosueM]

Thanks for reply DGrinev

[BHB3805]

Where is it stated to backup only a single domain controller?
We have three in our site, all GCs.
Two of the DCs have applications that need to run on a DC, Certificate Services and an authentication product from Crossmatch.
I backup all three DCs in a single job - is that not best practice?

[Pat490]

If you have 3 DCs which only serve AD than it is enough to only backup 1 of them but of course if there are additional software spread across those servers, than you need to backup them all