AVAILABILITY IS ONE OF THE PROPERTIES, or pillars, of the C-I-A triad of information systems security, along with confidentiality and integrity. Secure information must be available to authorized users when they request it. Ensuring information availability requires planning and preparation to confront issues that threaten to make your information unavailable. Issues include attacks to deny service, degraded performance, and failures or disasters that limit or terminate access to your information. A solid security plan includes both components to avoid situations that threaten information availability and procedures to deal with problems if they do occur.

In this chapter, you’ll learn about the basics of creating backup images and using them to restore your information. You’ll learn about different scenarios that can result in loss of information and how to recover from different types of loss. Although most people consider the backup the most important component of a recovery plan, you’ll learn how important other components really are. When you finish this chapter, you will be better prepared to protect your Windows computers from information loss.