Introduction

Regardless of how hard network administrators work to protect their networks and systems from disaster, sometimes the worst occurs. Servers are subject to hardware failure from age, overuse, or defects, data loss from hack attacks, and natural disasters such as fires or floods 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 several tools to help network administrators prepare for a serious system failure or attack, ensure that mission-critical data will not be lost and that server downtime is minimized. A good disaster preparation plan starts with a strategy for regularly scheduled backups. The Windows Backup Utility provides an easy way to back up data with Backup and Restore Wizards. Also included is the Automated System Recovery (ASR) Utility. The ASR Wizard helps the network administrator create a two-part backup of the essential system components: a floppy disk containing system settings and a backup of the local system partition on other media.

Windows Server 2003 also supports other, more sophisticated approaches to recovering from server hardware failure. Fault tolerant disks (Redundant Array of Independent Devices [RAID]) can be an important part of a disaster preparation plan, and if a network administrator is running the Enterprise Edition of Windows Server 2003, they also have the option of using server clustering the ultimate in fault tolerance.

This chapter shows how to create a basic backup plan for an organization s network and servers using the backup...