Recovering servers after a disaster

If a Windows server is lost, you can recover the entire server, including its operating system and system state, from a backup. You can recover:

• One server to physical hardware or a virtual machine. See Recovering a Windows server to hardware or to a virtual machine.

• One or more servers to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) in the AWS account where your backups are stored. During the recovery process, an EC2 instance is created for each recovered server. See Recovering Windows servers to the AWS cloud.

If you need to recover a server to physical hardware but new hardware is not yet available, you can temporarily recover the server to Amazon EC2. Backups will continue while the server runs in EC2. Once the physical hardware is available, you can recover the server from a backup in EC2 to the physical hardware.

You can also test a server recovery. In a test recovery, the Windows server is recovered but does not replace the original device in the Management Console. In a full recovery, the recovered server replaces the original device in the Management Console and backups continue automatically on the new server.