Maintaining and Troubleshooting

Disaster Recovery

Disaster recovery is necessary when your Exchange server has been completely destroyed by a catastrophic event, and you must restore it using only your backup tapes. Most disasters will not result in complete data loss, so you may follow the instructions that apply specifically to the data you have lost.

Important   Review the most up-to-date Disaster Recovery for Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server Web article available at www.microsoft.com/exchange before performing disaster recovery procedures.

Disaster recovery involves restoring information to a repaired or new computer, called a recovery server. The recovery server should not be in production, meaning it is not accessible to users. To restore information you must re-install Windows 2000, recover your system state from a backup, restore your system drive, run Exchange in disaster recovery mode, and then recover databases from a backup. Once these tasks are completed, the recovery server can become accessible to users and replace the failed server.


Important   Before you attempt to recover your server you must review:

Requirements for disaster recovery

Recovery guidelines


To recover from a complete server failure:

  1. Reinstall Windows 2000.
  2. Restore the system drive.
  3. Restore your Windows 2000 System State.
  4. Run Exchange 2000 Setup in disaster recovery mode.
  5. Use Backup to recover databases.

Related Topics

Understanding Disaster Recovery