Backing Up DHCP

While my agency was moving to new offices in the Pentagon a while back, we ran into many DHCP problems and needed a reliable DHCP backup that we could quickly and easily restore if necessary. My solution was to create a hidden share (i.e., DHCP$) on a support server that I set aside for the technicians. Then, I wrote the batch file that Listing 1 shows and copied the file to each DHCP server's system32 folder. I created a scheduled task on each DHCP server to run at 12:15 a.m. every day. The batch file checks for the existence of a folder (by computer name) and creates the folder if it doesn't exist. The script then stops the DHCP service, copies the DHCP folder's contents to the offsite folder, and restarts the DHCP service. The whole process takes less than a minute and gives me a daily backup of each DHCP server. If I need to restore a particular server, I simply restore the data from the affected server's backup folder on the support server. (For more information about moving a DHCP database from one server to another, see the Microsoft article "How to Move a DHCP Database to Another Windows Server" at http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=130642.)

—Charles Mella
[email protected]