Bare Metal Recovery

When disaster strikes, your organization needs a way to get back to its original system state quickly. Bare metal recovery (BMR) makes it possible to bounce back from hardware failure, ransomware, or natural disasters.

Bare metal restore and recovery solutions allow you to do things like disaster recovery without relying on preinstalled operating systems or software layers. For your IT team, this translates to reduced downtime and increased flexibility to restore on new, bootable hardware.

Creating a comprehensive bare metal backup and data recovery strategy is not optional. You can’t afford excess downtime or a loss of digital functionality. Combining bare metal recovery with other modern approaches like bare metal automation and provisioning gives your team the confidence to accelerate system recovery.

Explore bare metal provisioning, recovery, and automation in our comprehensive guide.

What Is Bare Metal Recovery?

Bare metal recovery refers to the process of restoring a complete system, including the operating system, applications, settings, and data, onto a physical machine without any preinstalled software. Unlike simple file or image backups, bare metal recovery ensures that an entire computing environment is exactly like it was when installed on new hardware, including recovery media.

Here are some key use cases for bare metal recovery:

• Hardware Failure: Restore servers quickly after a hard drive or motherboard crashes
• Malware or Ransomware Attack: Roll back an entire system to a clean state with a verified bare metal backup
• Disaster Recovery: Ensure continuity after events that render hardware unusable

A bare metal restore approach differs from general system recovery. The latter approach only restores files or OS components. Bare metal restore gives your IT team the confidence that the restored machine will be bootable, run applications, and function just like before.

Data protection and recovery promote long-term business continuity. Using a bare metal hardware configuration gives you the flexibility necessary to expedite your restore process and control your recovery point.

How Bare Metal Recovery Works

A typical bare metal recovery follows a structured process that ensures a complete system restoration. While the exact steps will vary based on your recovery media, most solutions include the following stages:

Preparing a Bare Metal Backup

Before recovery is possible, you need to create a comprehensive backup. Unlike file-level backup, bare metal backups capture the entire system image. The backup data includes partitions, drivers, operating system files, applications, and data. These full backups can be scheduled at regular intervals and stored locally or in a secure, off-site repository.

Creating Bootable Recovery Options

Once your backups are established, your IT team will need to prepare bootable recovery media. Options include a USB drive, hard disk drive, or network-based PXE boot image.

Your recovery media contains the tools required to initialize the system on a completely blank machine. It bypasses the need for an installed OS, making it possible to start recovery on brand-new or freshly repaired hardware.

Just be wary of common headaches, such as dissimilar hardware. Make sure your IT team verifies compatibility when setting up recovery options.

Restoring to the Same or New Hardware

During a bare metal restore, you can boot the target machine from recovery media and select the desired backup image. The tool then writes the system state, operating system, and partitions back onto the disk. A major advantage of bare metal recovery is hardware flexibility.

The restored environment does not require identical components. You can use this flexibility to your advantage, especially during disasters where finding new hardware is often difficult.

Validating the Recovery Process

After you’ve restored your data, you’ll need to validate it. To do so, your IT team will need to confirm that applications load correctly and services start. They will also need to verify the integrity of the data.

Creating a disaster recovery drill gives your team the chance to stress-test your strategy. They can restore test systems to confirm that processes are reliable under real-world conditions. Recovery validation is one of the most overlooked steps in disaster readiness.

In addition to the basics, you can explore advanced recovery options and recovery tools, which may include:

• Partition Management: Allows administrators to adjust disk partitions during recovery
• Cloud-Based Recovery: Restoring bare metal backups to virtual environments promotes business continuity
• Automated Workflows: Using platforms like Rebar allows you to orchestrate recovery, provisioning, and configuration simultaneously

These features extend the core value of bare metal recovery while promoting greater flexibility and speed.

Bare Metal Recovery vs. System State Recovery

Bare metal recovery and system state recovery are distinct options for bouncing back after a data loss event. System state recovery restores critical OS components and functionality, such as the following:

• Registry
• Active directory
• Boot files
• System services

It is useful for repairing corrupted operating systems, but it does not bring back your applications, user data, or full disk partitions. By contrast, bare metal recovery brings back the entire environment, including your OS, apps, drivers, and user data. As such, it’s the preferred data recovery option for total system rebuilds.

Tools & Best Practices

Bare metal solutions help you implement your recovery strategy. Some recovery media options to consider include:

• Digital Rebar from RackN
• Acronis
• Commvault
• Open-source tools like Clonezilla

Explore different options and identify the solution that is the best fit for your business. Once you’ve chosen the right tools, use these best disaster recovery practices:

• Schedule consistent full backups
• Keep bootable recovery tools up to date
• Conduct regular recovery tests
• Use bare metal automation to streamline your workflows

By combining automation and backup validation with rigorous testing, you can be ready when disaster strikes.

Explore Bare Metal Recovery Solutions From RackN

Want to simplify disaster recovery and provisioning? RackN provides Rebar and BMR software designed to help you promote data resilience. RackN also offers a variety of other solutions, including bare metal automation. Contact us to learn more.

Common Questions About Bare Metal Recovery

What Is a Bare Metal Restore?

A bare metal restore is the process of rebuilding a complete system from a backup image directly onto physical hardware.

What Is Bare Metal Backup?

A bare metal backup captures the entire environment in a single image used for recovery.

What Is Bare Metal Disaster Recovery?

Bare metal disaster recovery means restoring systems to new or repaired hardware after a disaster to achieve business continuity.

What Do System State Backups Include?

System state backups include OS-level data like the registry, boot files, and Active Directory, but do not restore applications, user files, or full disk partitions.