Make sure that disaster recovery planning includes considerations for the physical site, power, entire system failure, server component failure, and software corruption.
Identify the different services and technologies, points of failure, and critical areas; then prioritize in order of importance.
Make sure that the D/R solution contains costs associated with additional hardware, complex configurations, and a service-level agreement estimating how long it will take to recover the service should a failure occur. Different options should also be presented.
Document the server configuration for any environment regardless of size, number of servers, or disaster recovery budget.
Back up system volumes and the system state at the same time to simplify recovery if a server needs to be rebuilt from scratch.
Perform an ASR backup after the server is built, updated, configured, and secured. Also, perform an ASR backup when hardware configurations change and periodically otherwise.
Perform an ASR backup on domain controllers every 60 days to ensure that if an Active Directory authoritative restore is necessary, you can get the domain up and running again.
Set an appropriate size limit for the shadow copies. Volumes that have many files changed daily should have larger limits than volumes whose data does not change very often.
Schedule shadow copies to run more often on heavily used drives, at least twice a day.
Keep the number of stored volume shadow copies to a minimum to keep management simple.
Don't restore Active Directoryintegrated zones using a backup file. Instead, the zones should be created empty and the domain controller should re-create the records.
Ensure that the Remote Storage database will be backed up by backing up the system state.