Exchange server recovery- how to?

Disaster recovery when Exchange is on a DC is a little more complex than when it's just on a member server. Of course it's far from impossible.

Since you're attempting to simulate disaster recovery the server you are test restoring Exchange to cannot be plugged into your live domain. They really wouldn't agree.

It's worth noting at this point that once Exchange installed you cannot change the state of a server. That is, you can't Promote a member server to a DC, and you can't Demote a DC to a Member Server without breaking Exchange.

So, the first step has to be restoring the dead server. To start with you need to check out how to Restore your System State, this MS article will help somewhat I hope:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;240363

You can only perform an AD restore on a Server running AD. This means when you rebuild the server you create a basic installation and install only the very basics of AD, don't bother with configuration, the goal is to get the startup option available so you can restore the system state.

This method of restoring will bring back the Unique IDs bound to the Computer Account that Exchange expects to see when loading the databases.

If you were restoring onto a machine that wasn't a DC you wouldn't need to restore the System State, although you would still need the Computer Account to be present on the Domain.

Otherwise, follow the steps described in this article:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;297289

Disaster Recovery steps take the same form, except you can't follow Step 3, that only applies if the server you are restoring to is not a Domain Controller.

For further fun reading check out:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/exchange/2000/all/reskit/en-us/resguide/c28back.mspx

Which includes a lot of detail on the process you're looking into.

Please don't hesitate to ask again if I haven't covered everything you need.

HTH

Chris

A simpler (and more expensive) method ,would be to use something called Live State Recovery from Symantec.
About $1100 .

You can create a live server image ,along with incremental backups during the day.
That way, if you have a major disaster,you can restore from an up to date image file.
Since it is disk based,it is a whole lot faster than tape.

Thanks, but let me just reiterate the logic to see if i understood it correcty (i am a newbie in exchange, so please bear with me)
1- i will need to install the Windows server OS of course (and partition it in the same was as my existing Exchnage)
2- Recover system state (from tape)
3- Install basic AD
4- will  recovering to a non DC machine work? and what is the difference?

I forgot to mention that i have a secondary DC machine (low configuration, Pentuim 3, 500MHz) but we are using it as an SQL server for our library portal. So i will not be able to recover the system state of my exchange on this machine.

thanks

thanks chris, now i understand what you meant by the complexity of having exchange on a DC, I will accept your answer becuase it made sense to me but you will probably see me popping in again in this forum in the next two weeks becuase am sure it will not go smoothly,

thanks
Maya