Introduction

Regardless of how hard administrators work to protect their networks and systems from disaster, sometimes the worst occurs. Servers are subject to hardware failure due to age, overuse, or defects, data loss from hack attacks, and even natural disasters such as fire or flood that can destroy both the data and the systems themselves. Planning for disaster is an important part of every network administrator s job.

Windows Server 2003 includes tools to help you prepare for a serious system failure or attack, to ensure that your mission-critical data won t be lost and that server downtime will be minimized. A good disaster preparation plan starts with a strategy for regularly scheduled backups, and the Windows Backup utility provides you with an easy way to back up your data with the Backup and Restore Wizards. Also included is the Automated System Recovery (ASR) utility. The ASR Wizard helps you create a two-part backup of your essential system components: a floppy disk containing system settings and a backup of the local system partition on other media.

Other, more sophisticated approaches to recovering from server hardware failure are supported by Windows Server 2003 as well. Fault-tolerant disks (RAID) can be an important part of your disaster preparation plan, and if you re running the Enterprise Edition of Windows Server 2003, you also have the option of using server clustering the ultimate in fault tolerance.

In this chapter, we will show you how to create a comprehensive disaster recovery plan for your organization s network...