Managing The Windows 2000 Registry

Safety Strategies

The first step towards effectively preparing yourself to handle Registry problems is to adopt some strategies to safeguard your data. There are a number of fascinating books about the minutiae of planning for disaster recovery, but this isn’t one of them, so I’ll leave it to you to find out about off-site backups, fire suppression, and the other facets of preparing to deal with catastrophic failures. If you want to read more on this subject, check out the free (and very scary) Disaster Recovery Journal (http://www.drj.com). Instead, I’ll present two simple concepts that will save your bacon if you implement them. While they’re targeted at helping you recover from Registry failures, you can also apply them to other situations that might render your Windows 2000 machines (or any others, really) unusable or unavailable.

Make Backups

The cardinal rule of data protection is don’t depend on a single copy of your data! Of course, this rule is usually observed in the breach. You’d probably be surprised at the number of experienced administrators who make sure to back up data on all machines on the network, then forget to back up their own personal workstation! As you’ll see in Backing Up the Registry, there are several ways to duplicate the Registry’s contents. Whichever you choose, though, the following four principles will make sure your backup strategy works for you, instead of leading you into a false sense of security:

Make regular backups

If you back up data only ...