Backing up Active Directory Integrated DNS

So I’ve just experienced a loss of all DNS records. Out of the blue no users could resolve DNS. One of the users then reported that last night via the VPN they couldn’t resolve names – but happily connected to IP.

No errors were logged in the logs so I quickly went about running an ipconfig /registerdns to populate our local DNS Zone.

Shout out to Chris Wolf for a great tutorial on how to backup and restore an AD Int zone (http://redmondmag.com/columns/print.asp?EditorialsID=1024)

I will give you the basic run down:

1. Open a command prompt
2. type DNSCMD /ZoneExport thedomainyouneed.local backup\thedomainyouneed.local.dns.bak (obviously interchange thedomainyouneed.local to the domain name you actually use)
3. Press enter

This will save a .BAK file to %SystemRoot%\system32\dns\backup.

See Chris’ great article for information on how to restore (Fingers crossed I’ll never need it!)