Why backup data?
The modern disasters of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina demonstrate the ramifications of natural and non-natural disasters. Many companies did not have sufficient disaster recovery plans that covered serious scenarios. In the September 11th tragedy approximately 13,000 servers and 34,000 PCs were lost –entire infrastructures with no off-site backups. Priceless amounts of data lost forever.

An Example of Disaster Recovery
I used to work a desktop support position at a large medical company. One of my coworker was browsing through the Active Directory when he accidently renamed the ‘Board of Directors’ container to ‘dddddddd’. Instead of browsing to Active Directory accounts starting with ‘D’, he had actually modified the container’s name. These changes impacted the environment significantly because the majority of the user settings were assigned with scripts that piggy-backed off groups and containers in Active Directory. I found the entire situation quite humorous, but the other technician and Systems Administrator thought it was no laughing matter. At the time none of us knew what the original name of the container, so we couldn’t simply rename it. Over the next few hours we started receiving support tickets from some prestigious employees complaining about missing printers and drives. Our Systems Administrator came to the rescue by restoring a backup of Active Directory into a separate environment, where he discovered that the container was named ‘Board of Directors’.

Common Backup Schedule
A common backup schedule is a 3-stage backup process similar to this process:
1) Daily incremental backups, retained for 30 days.
2) Weekly incremental backups, retained for 3 months.
3) Monthly full backups, retained for 2 years.
This 3-stage rolling backup approach will provide more flexibility with disaster recovery, without consuming too many resources for data recovery.

Data Storage Solutions
There is an entire industry devoted to physical and electronic data storage. For example, one of the many services provided by Iron Mountain (www.ironmountain.com) is ‘Off-site Tape Vaulting’. Off-site Tape Vaulting services will help you to:
• Access your data whenever and wherever you need it
• Recover quickly following disasters and other disruptions
• Help reduce the possibility of data losses, theft and business interruptions
• Reduce compliance risks, enhance accountability with rapid data recovery
• User best practices for vaulting consistently across your organization
• Reduce costs with a convenient managed service

Related Links
Microsoft Technet – Active Directory Backup and Restore: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb727048.aspx
WindowsNetworking – Windows 2003 Data Backup and Recovery: http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/Windows-2003-Data-Backup-Recovery-Part1-General-Overview.html