esentutl - Uwe Gradenegger

Checking the integrity of backups of the certification authority database

Within the framework of the creation of a Backup of a certification authority The question may arise as to how to ensure that the integrity of the certification authority database backup is guaranteed so that it can be properly restored can be.

The Certification Authority database is available in a Microsoft JET Blue database engine (also known as Extensible Storage Engine, ESE). Their working and backup files have the extension .edb and can be created with the operating system tool esentutl be managed.

Compacting (defragmenting) the certification authority database

Sometimes it happens that the database of the certification authority becomes extremely large. Perhaps a large number of certificate requests have arrived unnoticed and have been rejected, or perhaps there are many certificates in the database that have been issued twice. After the corresponding entries have been deleted from the Certification Authority database, the space now gained must (can) still be freed by compacting this in the server's file system.

Incremental backups of the certification authority database fail with the error message "The database missed a previous full backup before incremental backup".

Assume the following scenario:

You use certutil.exe or the PowerShell commandlet Backup-CAService to back up your Active Directory Certificate Services database.
In addition to a full backup, you also perform regular incremental backups of the CA database.
The incremental backups fail with error message "The database missed a previous full backup before incremental backup".

Incremental database backup for...
 Backing up Log files: 0rtUtil: -backupDB command FAILED: 0xc8000230 (ESE: -560 JET_errMissingFullBackup)
 CertUtil: The database missed a previous full backup before incremental backup