"Our main data center is in [Oregon], but our off-site provider is on the East Coast. So we can get a dial tone of mailbox functionality running immediately to start sending and receiving e-mail, followed by a tape restore," says Scott Bueffel, messaging administrator at Con-way.

Logistics company Argix Direct archives e-mail over 30 days old on tape and does a nightly backup of the complete Exchange data store on ATA disk. Both are then copied and moved off-site. In the event of a disaster, the current mail store would be restored first.

"After this was completed, we would restore the archive, which would be considerably larger and therefore take longer, but Exchange would be up and available while this was running," says CIO Nino Silvano. "If the disaster did not affect the SAN where the backups are stored, we would be able to back up everything from disk immediately."

Hildreth is a freelance writer based in Waltham, Mass. She can be reached at Sue.Hildreth@comcast.net.