Active Directory® for Microsoft® Windows® Server 2003 Technical Reference

Active Directory Data Storage

As mentioned in Chapter 2, the Active Directory database is stored in a file called Ntds.dit, which is located in the %systemroot%\NTDS folder by default. This folder also contains the following files:

• Edb.chk. This file is a checkpoint file that indicates which transactions from the log files have been written to the Active Directory database.

• Edb.log. This file is the current transaction log. This log file is a fixed-length file exactly 10 megabytes (MB) in size.

• Edbxxxxx.log. After Active Directory has been running for a while, there might be one or more log files with the xxxxx filename portion being a value that is incremented in hexadecimal numbers. These log files are previous log files; whenever the current log ...