Deploying and Administering Windows Vista® Bible

Chapter 13. Recovering Damaged Systems and Lost Data

No matter how well you prepare your computer systems, someone somewhere will discover how to break them. This someone is usually one of your users, and the somewhere is usually in your organization. This is one of the rare truisms of computer system administration. You must be prepared and have a standard recovery procedure in place.

When you do so, you need to protect two different aspects of your systems:

• You must learn to recover computer systems. This topic was covered to a small extent in Chapter 12 as we discussed recovering BitLocker system volumes, but there are a lot of situations where systems are damaged and they do not include encrypted drives. Damage can range from one single component that no longer works to losing the entire system.

• You must learn how to recover data when the systems themselves are not damaged, but for some reason data has been lost. Once again, damage can range from the loss of a single file to the loss of an entire disk volume.

These are the two core topics of this chapter. Windows Vista includes a whole host of new features that are designed to help protect systems on an ongoing basis, and when things do go wrong, it includes quite a few new recovery tools that support recovering systems or data in any number of different situations.

Recovering Systems

In situations where things don't work as they should, you need to determine the level of the problem first, and then try to identify how you can fix ...