After completing this chapter, you will be able to:

- Understand the overall Exchange 2000 Server database architecture
- Understand various backup types
- Plan your data fault tolerance
- Design backup solutions and perform backups
- Design recovery solutions and perform disaster recoveries
- Troubleshoot backup and restore processes

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No matter how good your Active Directory (AD) and Exchange 2000 Server designs are, your career could be in danger if you have not thoroughly planned for disaster recovery. The planning and deployment of your Exchange organization is a sophisticated process. The minute your Exchange solution goes live, the entire corporation will depend on the service, so your duty, as an Exchange administrator, is to ensure reliability and availability. Without a proper backup plan in place, even such a small problem as a corrupted database page can lead to a disaster. At the very least, you will incur downtime or potentially lose vital business data. A proper backup strategy alone, however, is not enough. You must ensure that your backup strategy is reversible, meaning that you are able to regenerate the data and restore all the services in the least amount of time, thus minimizing production downtime. It is never enough to have only a backup strategy—the recovery strategy must also be planned and tested. You may never have to recover, but just in case you do, you must ensure that your solution actually works both ways. This testing may require additional hardware, which may be cost prohibitive for small businesses, but the cost of a catastrophic data loss could be devastating for a business of any size. You need to determine if you are ready to take this kind of gamble. By failing to test your backup and recovery, you are putting your entire data recovery strategy at risk. You therefore want to be sure to implement a step-by-step recovery process that is fully tested and documented.

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