Making Automated System Recovery Work for You

Windows 2003 offers an extremely helpful technology called Automated System Recovery, or ASR. The goal of ASR is to accelerate and simplify the process of a bare metal restore where you are restoring a system to new hardware from a recent backup.

ASR utilizes a precreated disk containing key information about recovering the system as well as special "bootstrap" code written into the setup executable on the Windows 2003 CD. This allows the CD to boot and read the recovery information from the recovery disk. The system then loads just enough of the operating system to access the backup software and device and performs the restore.

BEST PRACTICE: Saving Time on Restores

The clever administrator knows which systems need to run 24/7 and which systems can be taken down regularly. By taking down the non-24/7 systems regularly and creating a ghost image (or similar product) of your system drive you can create a bootable CD that will allow you to easily re-create the system drive. This is an extremely fast process. It's not unusual to be able to restore a system to brand new hardware and have the operating system and applications up and running in less than 20 minutes. Then you have the backup/restore agent available to restore data from tape. If you implement this type of a solution, be sure to update the ghost image and burn a bootable CD on a regular basis. Having a readily available image will allow for proactive planning for system recovery.