Registry and AD

When the operating system is loaded, the key Registry files (SAM, SECURITY, SYSTEM and SOFTWARE) are 'locked': no application running under the operating system itself can access them. However, you may still wish to read from these files yourself, for some password recovery or auditing tasks. This feature of PSPR allows you to create copies of the files, and those copies will not be locked. You can save Registry from the local machine or from the Remote machine (you should have Administrator privileges on that machine, though).

Press the Save Registry button and select (from the popup menu) All Registry, or just the particular Registry branch.

The program also allows you to save Registry files in text format: ANSI (REGEDIT4) or UNICODE (REGEDIT5). Just note that this operation takes much more time than saving in the original (binary) format, especially for the SYSTEM file. Also, you can use the Compress output file(s)  option to have the files compressed using Microsoft CAB format.

You can also save the Active Directory database (ntds.dit): select the AD server name, destination folder name (to save database to), Run backup under another security context option (if needed), as well as user name, domain and user password, and press the Backup AD database button. Note: this feature is not compatible with Windows Server Longhorn yet.