Chapter 21: Disaster Planning and Fault Tolerance | Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003 Administrators Companion (Pro-Administrators Companion)

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Overview

Smart SCUBA divers dive with a “buddy” and carry an alternate air source, even though they’ve trained extensively and checked their equipment thoroughly. Schools and businesses have fire drills even though the vast majority of buildings never burn down. Similarly, system administrators sincerely hope they’ll never need the verified backups and Automated System Recovery disks they have spent so much time creating. Nevertheless, we keep them because there are only two types of networks: those that have experienced disaster and those that haven’t—yet.

Disaster can take many forms, from the self-inflicted pain of a user or administrator doing something really, really unwise, to the uncontrollable, unpreventable results of a natural disaster such as a flood or an earthquake. In any case, your business will depend on how well you were prepared for the disaster and how well you and your team responded to it and recovered from it.

This chapter covers emergency preparedness. It discusses creating a disaster recovery plan, with standardized procedures to follow in the event of a catastrophe. It also describes how to prepare for a disaster, including how to make an Automated System Recovery disk, how to make a boot disk, how to install the Recovery Console, how to specify recovery options in Microsoft Windows Server 2003, and how to create an external recovery drive.

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