It is important to develop a disaster recovery plan before an emergency occurs. Therefore, ensure that administrators, operators, and support staff within the Exchange 2000 organisation have access to various training opportunities and documentation regarding disaster recovery issues.

If one or more of your servers experiences problems, the subsequent downtime can be costly. However, if you invest in good training courses and up-to-date technical manuals for server administrators, operators, and support staff, you will be prepared, and downtime will decrease. For information about various training courses and manuals, see ôAppendix B: Useful Recovery Resourcesö later in this document.

Aside from training courses and technical manuals, you can perform occasional disaster recovery simulations in separate, non-production domains. These simulations familiarise administrators, operators, and support staff with recovery procedures, as well as indicate any deficiencies in your backup and restore strategies.

The information in this article applies to:

• Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Enterprise Edition
• Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Standard Edition
• Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003, Premium Edition
• Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003, Standard Edition
• Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server