Microsoft 1 manual Disaster Recovery Procedures, Backing Up

80Microsoft Exchange 2000 Operations Guide — Version 1.0

Disaster Recovery Procedures

Chapter 2, “Capacity and Availability Management,” examined ways of minimizing system failures. As mentioned there, to reduce overall downtime you need to look at how frequently a system is down, alongside how long it takes to bring a system back up again. For more information on Availability Management, refer to Chapter 2.

It makes no sense to have a sound, well-exercised backup strategy unless it’s matched with a similarly mature recovery strategy. Backups are meaningless if you can’t restore service using them.

Exactly how you perform disaster recovery will depend on how much money you are willing to spend alongside which backup products you want to use. Third parties offer a variety of solutions, including mailbox level backup, and even message level backup in some cases. Another alternative is real-time byte level replication. You will find a list of third party vendors offering backup solutions for Exchange 2000 at the following Web site:

http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/thirdparty/E2Ksolutions.htm#backup

Whichever tools you use, the Operations Manager will need to ensure that the disaster recovery procedures meet the following criteria:

◆Backup is performed regularly and reliably.

◆Your data is protected against fire/theft/natural disaster.

◆Recovery can be performed reliably and quickly.

◆You regularly do test restorations on an offline server to ensure that backups are being correctly created.

◆You regularly run disaster recovery drills to keep skill levels high and ensure that your recovery procedures are up to date.

Backing Up

The rest of this section assumes that you are using Windows NT Backup as your backup and restore software. However, much of the information contained here is relevant which- ever backup solution you choose to adopt.

One of the major considerations when performing a backup is how long it will take. When performing an online backup of stores on your servers running Exchange, you suspend other online maintenance activities. Therefore, to allow appropriate time for the other online maintenance activities to occur each night, you need to minimize the length of time backup takes. Also, if it takes a long time to back up these servers, it will almost certainly take a long time to restore them, and to meet your SLAs you will want to keep your recovery times to a minimum.