Why DC Snapshots Are No Substitute for Active Directory Backups

Why VM snapshots of domain controllers are unsupported: how USN rollback breaks replication across the up-to-dateness vector, and what separates supported AD snapshots from the risky kind.

Argues AD recovery is an essential, often-overlooked part of ITDR: with 50% of organizations attacked and pen testers exploiting 82% of AD exposures, recovery capability matters as much as prevention.

A practical look at the ROI of fast AD recovery: quantifying lost operations while AD is down (Baltimore's $18M hit), why ransomware crews target AD objects—group accounts, GPOs, SYSVOL, DCs—and why continuity plans must cover AD.

Ransomware makes total AD meltdown realistic, but recovery practice has barely changed in 15 years; DXC's Guido Grillenmeier lists AD recovery dos and don'ts—from detailed plans to offline backups.

Active Directory fails in two flavors—DC outages and logical corruption of directory data—but recovery plans often address only the first; the post explains why logical corruption is harder to heal.

AD runs reliably day to day, yet common bad configurations put domains at risk of data loss and DC failure; the post catalogs eight situations admins overlook, however elementary they seem.