With failover clustering, your environment is configured as highly available. You should also, however, make sure you take care of backing up your cluster, in case it encounters a failure. To achieve this, you can use Windows Server Backup or any non-Microsoft backup solution. If you use Windows Server Backup, this feature needs to be installed on each node in the cluster. For a successful backup, you need to be aware of the following:

• The cluster must be running and must have a quorum
• You must back up all clustered applications
• If you have SQL Server in the cluster, you must back up the SQL databases and configuration
• If you have application data on a cluster disk, you need to back up the data as well

If you need to restore the cluster, there are two known types of restoration:

• Nonauthoritative restore: This restores a single node in case of failure or damage
• Authoritative restore: Use this when you must restore the cluster configuration