Planning for Disaster Recovery

Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1, Windows Server 2003 with SP2

A number of technologies are available that provide fault tolerance in the event of a failure, such as fault tolerant disk configurations with hot swappable drives, server clusters, and uninterruptible power supplies, However, all of these high availability technologies cannot substitute for having a reliable backup of mission-critical data.

In a complete site disaster, for example, it is possible that both online and offline availability technologies are destroyed (for example, all cluster nodes and all disks in a RAID array). Following such a system failure or disaster at a particular site, you must be able to recover data and systems from backup. Recovering systems or sites from failure is a daunting task, unless you have thoroughly planned and prepared by implementing scheduled backups, providing for backups of open files, and configuring for Automated System Restore. You must also thoroughly test your ability to restore data. The tasks involved in planning for disaster recovery are shown in Figure 1.10.

Figure 1.10   Planning for Disaster Recovery