Exchange Server disaster recovery plan considerations

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The most important thing is that you test your Exchange Server disaster recovery (DR) plan a few times to confirm that everything works as intended. What you propose sounds fine in principle, but you need to test to ensure you have all the details worked out.

One thing you may want to consider: some third-party utilities on the market circumvent the requirement for an Exchange recovery server. In essence this allows you to stand up any 'cold' or 'warm' site and then import the mailboxes directly from backup media to the production server, without a need for recovery servers and associated recovery steps. I'm assuming you have a Service Level Agreement (SLA) of some sort in place (or at least implied expectations). These will dictate how much you streamline the overall DR process outlined in your plan.

Of course, much more is involved in this process. I've seen consultants spend weeks working with customers to develop an Exchange Server DR plan -- from making sure software media and licenses are in place to documenting your backup rotation and offsite storage -- through documentation of all elements of people, process and technology required for successful execution of the DR plan.

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