A bare metal restore (BMR), also known as a bare metal recovery or bare metal backup, is a process that involves completely restoring a system, including its operating system (OS), applications, files, and settings. It is designed to restore an entire system to “bare” hardware so that it can be rebuilt in its entirety, even without a pre-installed OS.
What is bare metal restore used for?
A bare metal restore allows technicians to restore a system directly from a backup image. This makes a bare metal restore ideal for protecting critical business data from significant data loss.
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System migrations
During hardware upgrades or migrations to new infrastructure, a bare metal restore simplifies the transition by allowing complete system transfers without manual reconfiguration.
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Disaster recovery
Should a server or workstation’s physical components fail or a cyberattack corrupt networks and devices, a bare metal restoration allows IT professionals to restore data to new hardware, ensuring business continuity and disaster recovery.
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Compliance with industry regulations
A bare metal restore helps organizations with compliance management by offering IT teams a reliable recovery option. For some industries, such as healthcare or finance, regulatory standards require the protection of sensitive data.
How does bare metal restore work?
Technicians can then access the backup image file of a system to initiate its restoration. This is a relatively quick process that can help minimize downtime.
Technicians typically use bare metal recovery-compatible recovery media. This could be a USB drive or an ISO file stored on a cloud backup server. Once the system is running from the recovery media, the backup image is accessed from its storage location. The bare metal restore software then reconstructs the system on the original or a new hardware by reinstalling the OS, applications, system configurations, and data.
What is the difference between bare metal and full backup?
There are multiple types of backup, and each one provides different methods for data protection and restoration.
A full backup involves creating copies of all the data on a device, including files, folders, and hard drives. The process of creating a full backup takes less time than a bare metal backup, as a full backup usually only involves backing up files and documents.
While a bare metal backup involves creating a full copy of a system and capturing everything from the OS to applications and configurations, a full backup focuses mainly on files and does not typically include OS configurations.
Is bare metal backup better than full backup?
Full backups work better for routine data protection. Restoring a full backup assumes the preservation of the underlying system environment and might take more time to restore. Thus, since they are less resource-intensive, they cannot do complete system restoration, making them less suitable for scenarios involving significant data loss and catastrophic system failures
On the other hand, a bare metal backup offers faster recovery times and creates a complete restoration of a device’s entire system, including the operating system and applications. By allowing technicians to restore a system to entirely new hardware without a pre-installed OS makes bare metal backups a better choice for ensuring data protection in the event of hardware failure or system-wide corruption from cyberattacks.
In the end, bare metal backup and full backup have different uses, and incorporating both types of backup helps round out an organization’s backup strategy.
What are the advantages of a bare metal restore?
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Complete system recovery
A bare metal restore recovers every aspect of the system, ensuring that all applications and data are exactly as they were before the data loss incident. This includes user-specific settings and even the layout of icons.
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Faster data restoration
By eliminating the need to reinstall the OS and applications manually, a bare metal restore significantly reduces the time required to get a system back up and running.
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Ensures data integrity
A bare metal restore precisely restores not only data but applications and system configurations, minimizing the risks of corrupted or incomplete data recovery.
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Data security
If a device has been compromised by a virus or malware, a bare metal restore restores a system to its pre-infected state. It’s also a suitable choice for ransomware recovery as it can revert locked or encrypted files to their previous state.
Leveraging bare metal restore for data security
Any IT department’s backup strategy and disaster recovery plan would benefit from incorporating bare metal restores. A bare metal restore enables IT teams to rapidly recover from severe data loss incidents and reduce downtime. Not only does a bare metal restore allow for rapid recovery, it also ensures that businesses can maintain their daily operations, revert files or systems locked by ransomware attacks, and safeguard sensitive data.
