Yesterday I worked through an authoritative restore of active directory. A number of user accounts, including the 'system mailbox' account had been deleted. We decided a full AD restore would address the issues without too much pain, as nothing had changed in the AD schema recently. There were some pain points, mainly waiting around unsure to force a server offline or continue to wait. Here I document what we followed and some tips to help anyone in the similar situation. Click (View Page) for the full article