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Domain Controller HDD Duplicating

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by thedodger4053

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I have two Domain controllers, PDC & BDC and I need to have my users access the data on one of the secondary drives on the BDC. How do I backup the files from the BDC to the PDC while keeping track of changes in the files? Also, is there a way to have them access the PDC if the BDC crashes and no one is around to restart it?

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by rkelly

Sounds like you need the Distributed File System (Dfs). You can implement this in the following way in Win2K.

Install a domain based DFS root, then you can add replicated child nodes. These replicated child nodes can be used to copy the existing data from one of your DCs (in Windows 2000 we nolonger have PDCs and BDCs) to the other. It uses the file replication service to copy data from one machine to the other (the data MUST be on an NTFS volume for this to work) and with fault tolerant child nodes if one server fails uses can be redirected to the other.

Use the help files that come with DFS on Win2K they explain ALL the steps.

by mckaytech

Answer 1 is correct in a Windows2000 environment but it sounds like you have an NT environment.

You are basically trying to mirror a data partition on two different servers and NT is pretty weak at that sort of thing. There are third-party utilities that can accomplish this but I'm having a momentary brain fade and can't come up with some names other than I think one such product is called Vinca.

If your data is fairly static and doesn't have to be replicated in real-time, a simple file copy and a log-in script that maps a different drive if the primary drive is not available could be used (they would have to re-boot on server failure but hopefully that would be a rare occurence).

paul

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