Today I made the worst single click of my life. Apparently, one click can delete one group in Active Directory or a whole OU! Once you have said "OK" to the pop up, all is lost. I mistakenly deleted an OU that has all of our staff when I meant to delete just one group.
Well at least I have backups. I have used our CA Arcserve 11.5 backup software before to restore deleted files and it has worked OK. That was until today. I went to restore the system state and found out that it was not as granular as I wanted. I just wanted to restore one OU but my only option was to restore everything. I though that would have to do so I went to restore it and it failed. Right away I called up the tech support (that's what they re there for right?) and had a guy walk me though it. We thought we had it and I hung up.
Nope. Didn't work. I tried a few more things and then called them back. After a 3 hour conversation with the over seas tech support (Sometimes hard to understand but they stick with it) he wanted to call it a night and see if some others in the group would have answers. I reluctantly said OK. He just kept trying the same thing over and over again any way so I tried a few things of my own.
The error we kept getting was because when you restore the system state, you have to bring the system up in "Directory Services Restore Mode" which logs you in with that account. The backup software however runs on local or network credentials and therefore kept having issues. I finally was able to get the right combination of credentials for the services to run with and it worked!
I can't wait to tell the tech support guy tomorrow when he calls back that I figured out in 30 min what he couldn't in 3 hours!
This is one more time when tech support has let me down. But at least my network is back up! Time to make to set a backup schedule in Windows Backup to make sure it works next time!
