Backups and Restores in a Microsoft World

I spent this week learning about Windows 2003 Active Directory. The technology is not new, but there have been major improvements since its introduction several years ago. The course was great as was the instructor. Everything was going great until the very last Practice exercise. The purpose of such was to create an item in Active Directory, backup the system, delete the item we just created (for which there is no undelete), and then restore Active Directory to retrieve the item we deleted. To make a long story short, the backup on my server got corrupted. The restore on my server failed without errors -- and then the corrupted Active Directory was propagated to other servers. Within minutes the whole lab was toast -- none of the servers would allow us to create new objects in the database. The moral of the story is that your system is only as good as its weakest links. Backups and restores continue to be a weak link in computer technology. Disaster recovery, which backups and restores are part of, has received much attention over the years, yet we still have serious weaknesses in the built-in tools of advanced operating systems like Windows 2003 Server. My theory is that Microsoft does this by design to allow its partners to create and sell add-on products to fill in the gaps that Microsoft left open on purpose. Everyone wins except the end-user. If that is the case, is Microsoft guilty of misrepresentation and deceit?