This chapter provided a step-by-step guide to forest recovery and, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, this is something that should be used only as a last resort. It's a very time consuming process when you have to remove all of the old records and reset passwords. Proper AD documentation will help immensely in this scenario. Something to be understood is that in medium to large organizations or multinational organizations this scenario will not be accomplished within a day. This will be an outage for several days until you have a fully recovered a functional forest. On the other hand, large organizations should have safeguards in place, such as proper replication schedules, that will allow stopping the replications and hence, minimizing the DCs affected.

When performing a forest recovery, monitoring, checking for errors, ensuring data availability, and making sure that servers are registered in the DNS and can communicate, are standard good practices to follow. There...