Tip 1: Include AD in Your Recovery Plan
In many cases, recovering Exchange also means recovering Active Directory (AD). Small companies often have only one server for both Exchange and AD, and even in very large environments, a minor mistake in AD can have consequences for the complete Exchange and AD configuration. Since Exchange Server 2003 and Exchange 2000 Server rely heavily on AD, make sure you frequently back up your domain controller's (DC)'s system state, which includes AD, the registry, boot files, certificate services, Microsoft IIS, COM+, and Sysvol information. Perform system-state backups at least as often as you back up Exchange.
Thoroughly check and test your system-state backup and restore capabilities and make sure that the NTDS and Sysvol volumes have enough space to perform a complete system-state restore. I've seen restores of Global Catalogs (GCs) larger than 2GB fail on disks with more than 2GB of free space. Make sure that your recovery plan includes procedures to restore AD both authoritatively and non-authoritatively. For instance, deleting or changing important directory objects in AD in a multiple-DC environment will require you to perform an authoritative AD restore, whereas you'd want to use the non-authoritative restore to recover a DC that failed completely because of hardware errors. For more information about AD backup and restore procedures, see the Microsoft TechNet "Active Directory Operations Guide," http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/9c6e4dd4-3877-4100-a8e2-5c60c5e19bb01033.mspx. . . .
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