I hope this isn’t the first chapter you started to read when you picked up this book. I know that in the middle of a crisis, sometimes you turn immediately to the information you hope will help. This isn’t that chapter.
Here’s why: disaster recovery for IIS is a planning process, not an immediate fix for a failure. Part of this planning process requires that you fully understand the web environment you’re responsible for so you know what needs to be recovered in the event of a failure. To help accomplish that—and to become successful at disaster recovery—I hope you’ve been reading through the book, one chapter at a time, over your lunch, because then you’ll understand IIS and have a better understanding of what needs to be protected.
The best disaster-recovery planning starts with avoiding the disaster in the first place. I’ve focused almost a third of this book on high-availability solutions that will protect you from a server failure. No matter what size web environment you’re working with, you must implement some form of high availability, even if it’s only two servers in a simple Microsoft Network Load Balance with a Shared Configuration. Products such as the Web Farm Framework and Application Request Routing are excellent, free solutions for this.