What is a Bare Metal Restore?

Bare metal restore refers to rebuilding a system from a bare metal state (without any OS) in the event of a catastrophe. This type of restore requires you to rebuild your entire system from scratch, including the operating system, software applications, files, settings and system preferences.

Done manually, this is a cumbersome process that requires a lot of man hours to complete. Typically this involves reinstalling the operating system, then reinstalling any software applications that are needed.

The difficult part here is that most people do not keep a backup copy of all of their software applications as many programs are downloaded from the internet these days. Just trying to find copies of all of the software and the corresponding keys could set you back an entire day. Next you would need to restore all of your files and settings, that is, if you created a backup.

Advantages of Creating a Disaster Recovery Image Backup

With the use of disk imaging or disaster recovery software, you can speed this process along considerably by performing system image recovery. Rather than manually reinstalling everything from scratch, you would simply use the disaster recovery image you created of your system to restore everything, just as it was before disaster hit. That means it creates a copy of your operating system, all of your Windows and applications files and settings, your software applications and all of your files, so everything can be restored just as if nothing ever happened.

To protect yourself from having to go through the process of a manual bare metal restore of your system, you need to create an image backup of your entire system. Most backup software includes some type of image-based backup option, although you should verify this as some companies charge an additional fee for disaster recovery.

An image backup is essentially an exact copy or "Snapshot" of your entire system. This means that unlike a normal file-based backup, an image-based backup is capable of restoring an entire drive of information without any other software (i.e. no operating system) being previously installed on the system.

Full System Restore to Dissimilar Hardware

Backup software from NovaBACKUP includes disaster recovery, which allow you to create an image of one machine and restore it to another machine even with dissimilar hardware, different-sized partitions or dissimilar brands of computers. This means that you have the ability to migrate the entirety of your old machine to a new machine, even if it uses a completely different hardware configuration than the original machine.

Rather then spending countless hours doing a manual restore, you can perform a full system restore in less than 30 minutes. This backup and recovery software can also mount disaster recovery images as drives and restore single files from disk images. This video walks you through how to create a disaster recovery image backup using NovaBACKUP.