Disaster Recovery for CompTIA Server+ (SK0-004)

Disaster Recovery Sites and Replication
Hello and welcome to Pluralsight! My name is Mike Pfeiffer, I'll be your instructor for this course on disaster recovery for the CompTIA Server+ exam. In this first module, we're going to take a look at some of the key differences between disaster recovery sites, and then we'll look at some replication scenarios as well that you can use within your disaster recovery sites, and also make your data more durable and redundant. Let's go ahead and dive right in and take a look at what we're going to cover in this module. First we're going to talk about building a hot site. And a hot site is basically a secondary data center where you can mirror your primary data center with all of the severs, the applications, the data, and everything else that you need to provide services to your end users and to your customers. Next we'll take a look at implementing a warm site, and this is basically a step down from a hot site. There's still a secondary data center involved, but there's a few more things you would need to do to cut over to this site in the event of a disaster. We'll talk about setting up a cold site, which is really the third and final disaster recovery site topology that you need to be aware of. And this is the disaster recovery site type that's the hardest to cut over to in the event of a disaster, but it's still an option. Finally we'll take a look at data replication scenarios such as replicating from one disk to another, one server to another, and then one site to another.

Business Continuity
In this module we're going to take a step back from the technical details, and talk about business continuity and creating business continuity plans. So first we'll start off by defining a business continuity plan and how you would go about creating one. And you want to think about a business continuity plan as a higher level process that entails everything that you need to do to restore your business and keep everything running. This includes your disaster recovery plan and a few other things. We'll also talk about performing a Business Impact Analysis, and then we'll wrap things up by talking about creating a disaster recovery plan and we'll take a look at this from a higher level, not the actual technical steps on what you actually need to do to restore servers, but other things that you need to think about from a high level that need to be included within your disaster recovery plan.

Implementing Backups
When it comes to disaster recovery, implementing backups is going to be one of the most important things that you can do because outside of just having a DR site, you need to have the ability to restore your data. So in this module, we're going to take a look at the primary things that you should think about. And obviously, this is going to help you prepare for the Sever+ exam. Let's take a look at the module overview. First, we're going to talk about determining your backup methodology. There's a lot of different ways that you can capture the data that's running on your systems, and this goes from just grabbing everything on the system to doing just very selective backups, as well as other things like taking snapshots and doing open file backups. So we'll talk about all of those methodologies. We'll talk about the two most popular media types when it comes to choosing backup media for your system backups. Primarily we're going to look at tape and hard drives in this course because that's what you're going to be tested on in the Server+ exam. And then we'll wrap up this module talking about data restoration best practices. So we'll look at on-site versus off-site backups, as well as security considerations and environmental considerations when it comes to storing your backups for disaster recovery purposes.