I joined an organisation a year ago (their first IT manager) to a number of problems, highest priority being a bad stripe on their Raid5 array.

Shortly after I started, I installed more comprehensive backup software (veritas 9) with the DR module, ensuring I had a good and verified backup each day. Their server then started failing one drive at a time. I've done disaster recovery, but never under this pressure.

In the few hours as two drives went down, I set up a second Global catalogue DC, replicated AD and joined it to the domain as a failsafe if the backup didn't hold.

Thankfully, and after a long night breaking and rebuilding the array, restoring data, it worked. Exchange mounted, and all I had to sort were a few event log problems.

Since then, I've become a serious fan of Veritas and their DR module. I get the impression I was a little lucky though, after reading some other horror stories...!