Backup and Restoration Planning
High availability of the centralized management servers is critical. The goal is to have no unscheduled outages. Regular backups conducted under rigorous process are mandatory. This starts with formal backup policies that completely define the who, what, when, and how of backups all the way through to offsite storage. These policies must be defined, documented, and formally accepted as a way of life in the hosting center.
Design Backup Solution - Technology and Automation of Policies. The backup solution should include policy definition and recommendations for automating and scheduling of backups.
Test Backup Solution - You must test the backup design prior to going live.
Deploy Backup Solution - After you successfully test the backup solution for centralized management, you must deploy the servers and this backup process into the production environment.
Define Disaster Recovery Scenarios - You need to define scenarios and then plan, design, test, and deploy against your disaster recovery scenarios.
Practice Periodic Disaster Recovery Drills - These drills must not impact service operations but must still prove that the entire recovery solution maintains its effectiveness. The disaster recovery drills must be performed on a regular basis.
Back Up a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 Server
In order to start Windows Server 2003 Backup, you must log on to the target server using an account that has Administrator or Backup Operator privileges. If you log on using an account that does not have these privileges, you will be unable to back up the Active Directory directory service configuration.
Start Windows Server 2003 Backup, which is available on the System Tools menu, and select to back up everything on your computer. Next select the destination by browsing to a destination and entering a backup file name. This is where you can select an external backup device such as a tape array.
You can choose to overwrite or append to a backup set and other alternative choices. On completion of this operation, the server is successfully backed up.
If you are backing up a domain controller, when the Backup wizard finishes, the domain controller including the Active Directory and File Replication Service are completely backed up.
In a data center environment, a centralized disaster recovery-based system is used to back up the servers on the data floor and the domain controllers will be backed up to remote storage.
Note
- You cannot perform backup and recovery of the Active Directory configuration from a remote computer. Domain controller backup and recovery procedures must be executed locally. However, a Windows Server 2003 server that is not a domain controller can be backed up and restored remotely.
- Certain log files such as IIS log files that store usage data will fail to be backed up if Internet Information Services is actively running. This means that either the service must be stopped (by stopping the W3SVC through net stop W3SVC at a command prompt), or the log files must be backed up through an alternate mechanism.
For more information about Windows Server 2003 Backup, see Backup Technical Reference.