Let’s walk through a real-world example. A user named "John.Smith" was deleted 6 hours ago.
For years, sysadmins have relied on AdRestore, a command-line tool from Mark Russinovich’s legendary Sysinternals suite. AdRestore allows you to list and restore deleted objects from Active Directory’s tombstone lifecycle.
However, the original tool has two major drawbacks in modern environments:
AdRestoreNet changes the game. It is a community-driven, open-source GUI wrapper that provides a visual interface on top of the same powerful undelete logic—and it adds support for the modern AD Recycle Bin.
| Requirement | Details | |-------------|---------| | Permissions | Domain Admin or delegated Reanimate Tombstone control | | OS | Windows Server 2008 R2 – 2022, Windows 10/11 (x64) | | .NET | .NET Framework 4.7.2 or later | | AD access | Must be run from a domain-joined machine with LDAP connectivity to a DC |
The original AdRestore (Sysinternals) has not seen a major update since 2016, yet it remains functional. AdRestoreNet, being an open-source wrapper, has seen community contributions adding dark mode, improved sorting, and compatibility with Windows Server 2022.
As Microsoft moves toward cloud-native identities (Azure AD), on-prem AD recovery tools are becoming niche. However, for hybrid environments, adrestorenet the gui version of adrestore remains an essential utility in every domain administrator’s toolkit.
With adrestore.exe, restoring an object requires a second command: adrestore -r -t 60 "username". Mistype a flag, and you’ve done nothing. With AdRestoreNet, you simply:
