What is Authoritative and Non-authoritative restore?

Non-Authoritative:

When doing a normal restore, Backup is working in nonauthoritative mode. That means that any data (including Active Directory objects) will have their original sequence number. This is the number AD replication uses to detect if there are any new objects to replicate to other servers. So when you use Normal restore any data will appear as old and will therefore not replicate to other servers. If newer data is available, it will of course replicate to the restored server. This method is used when restoring all but the first replica set and when restoring a single domain controller in a replicated environment.


Authoritative restore:

 This is the third method. To perform an authoritative restores you have to run a utility called Ntdsutil. This must be run after you have restored the System State data, but before you restart the server. When you perform this kind of restore the sequence number of Active Directory objects are changed so that it has a higher number. This will ensure that any data you restore will be replicated (because Active Directory replication thinks it‘s new). This is a little bit difficult to understand, but if you compare this to Normal restore, Normal restore will always mark objects as old, and authoritative restore will always mark objects as new. So simply said, use Authoritative restore when you have changed something and the change has been replicated to all other servers and you want to undo the change.