BritV8

FWIW ,if you need to ever do a full forest restore or roll back your schema update(rare to never in chance) , you need full system drive backup and a recent system state backup to actually carryout that full forest restore as everything has to be offline, so the backup needs to be local (e.g. USB). Just going through this with a windows 2012 R2 migration and if you end up ringing MS support, they really want you to use their backup software, so they can help. Use some other product and have a problem, call that vendor

You can choose either one to be the master, just choose 1! and stick with it. If you start for example updating DHCP reservations and forget to replicate it you can end up in trouble. I wrote a page on this here http://britv8.com/dhcp-2012-r2-static-reservations-replication-not-working/ which covers both 2012 and R2. It is really a lot easier in R2 to manage the scopes To delete a scope, you must break the relationship