From: Pete Tanenhaus, ADSM Client Development        TANENHAU at GDLVM7
To:   ADSM-L at VM.MARIST.EDU
Subject: NT System32\config directory

This directory contains the actual registry files.

These files are always in use by the system (open deny r/w)
and cannot be accessed directly.

The reason this directory is excluded is that attempting
to do anything with these files is useless because they
are always opened by the system in deny r/w mode.

The NT client backup/restore functions indirectly handle
these files by using Win32 Registry Apis.

Every time a registry backup is performed a copy of these
files is written to the Adsm.Sys\Registry directory on the system
partition, and every time a registry restore is performed a
a copy of currently active registry is written to the
Adsm.Sys\Registry.Sav directory.

The files in these directories correspond directly (except the names
are slightly different) to the files residing in Sytem32\Config.

In fact, one method of manually restoring the last backed up copy
of a damaged registry is to boot another operating system such as DOS
or NT from a different partition, and to copy directly copy the
files from Adsm.Sys\Registry to System32\Config (the filenames
are close enough to be able to figure out whats what).

Under these circumstances this is possible because the copy of NT
to which these files correspond is not active.

Anyway, to answer your original question, yes it is safe to
exclude the System32\Config directory, all these files are
backed up indirectly via the registry backup functions.

Pete Tanenhaus
ADSM Client Development