What are authoritative and non-authoritative Active Directory restores?

What are authoritative and non-authoritative Active Directory restores?

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There are two general methods of restoring Active Directory from the backup media: authoritative and non-authoritative.

Authoritative restore makes the computer authoritative over other domain controllers. Data restored authoritatively in a computer takes precedence over other domain controllers' data, despite the fact that the restored data is older than the current replicas. Authoritative restore is typically used to restore a system to a previously known state. The NTDSUTIL command-line tool allows authoritatively restoring the entire directory, a subtree, or individual objects, provided they are leaf objects.

A non-authoritative restore results in the restored data (which may be outdated) becoming synchronized with the data on other domain controllers through replication.

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