July 23, 2008: Exchange Admins, read this.
Running Exchange 2003? Exchange 2003 Disaster Recovery Operations Guide
Exchange 2007? Disaster Recovery and perhaps High Availability
Sometime in your Exchange admin career, you’ll be asked to recover lost data. This isn’t because Exchange itself is intrinsically a fragile platform. But if you do not set it up with recovery situations in mind, there’s a great likelihood that when one does come around, you may find yourself filled with frustration and rage.
The key here is to think of these DR procedures as proactive measures; not something you postpone until the day an issue arises. Being proactive will make that day much less likely to occur, and make the (now much less likely) disaster response a much more pleasant event.
I estimate that (depending on your Exchange setup complexity and size) the task of sitting down with this paper and bringing your Exchange to disaster readiness is a 2-3 day task. It’ll save you far more than that in the long run, but you’ll never really know. It’s like tying your shoes: how many broken legs has that saved you from?
