If you think administering Active Directory is a black art, then welcome to another esoteric undertaking -- successful Active Directory backup and disaster recovery.

Quest Software's Recovery Manager for Active Directory 7.0, the Bronze Award winner, was a strong entrant and prevailed over Winternals Insight for Active Directory for service and support. But in the final tally, there was still a small fraction separating it from Silver..

The product advances Active Directory backup and recovery beyond Windows Server 2003's "tombstone reanimation," which lets administrators recover deleted objects within 60 days, before they permanently disappear.

Recovery Manager supports the Microsoft-sanctioned tombstone reanimation feature and provides a wizard-based interface to guide in the recovery of Active Directory, System State, Group Policy data or even an individual object.

Administrators can enable unattended Active Directory backups during off-peak hours, so that when trouble comes, administrators will be ready with up-to-date backup data. Recovery Manager provides online granular restore, meaning that only the changed data needs to be recovered. Domain controllers stay online, to minimize downtime and user impact.

Pricing: Recovery Manager for Active Directory is priced at $8 per protected user account. Volume discounts are available.

Brent Sheets, senior editor