The most common errors resulting in provisioning failures, and that require you to restore data from backups, occur because changes have been made directly to the data stores rather than using the Microsoft Provisioning System (MPS) to make changes to your hosting platform.

For example, an administrator may have directly removed an object in Active Directory, and now related data stores are out of synch because MPS has not resynchronized those changes throughout the platform. As a rule of thumb, always follow provisioning guidelines and use MPS when adding, removing, or making changes to the configuration of your hosting platform.