◦ Setup in under 1 hour
◦ User-friendly API
Bare Metal → Restore
What is bare metal restore?
What is bare metal restore?
Bare metal restore is a comprehensive recovery process that allows you to rebuild a system from the ground up on a machine without any pre-installed software or operating system. This method is particularly useful when dealing with completely unresponsive or corrupted systems, as it doesn’t rely on any existing software to function.
By restoring the system at the block level of the filesystem, BMR ensures a more granular and efficient recovery process compared to traditional file-level or system image backups.
When to use bare metal restore
Bare metal restore is particularly beneficial in scenarios such as:
- Disaster recovery: After catastrophic events like hardware failures, system crashes, or cyberattacks, BMR can quickly restore your system to its previous state.
- Hardware upgrades or migrations: When transitioning to new hardware, BMR allows for a seamless transfer of the entire system without the need for manual reconfiguration.
- System cloning: For deploying identical system environments across multiple machines, BMR provides an efficient cloning solution.
How bare metal restore works
The BMR process typically involves the following steps:
- Backup creation: A complete system backup is created, capturing the operating system, applications, settings, and data at the block level.
- Recovery media preparation: Bootable recovery media (such as a USB drive or CD) is prepared to initiate the restore process on the target machine.
- System boot: The target machine is booted using the recovery media, allowing access to the backup image.
- Restoration: The backup image is applied to the target machine, restoring the system to its previous state.
This process ensures that the restored system is an exact replica of the original, minimizing downtime and eliminating the need for manual reinstallation or configuration.
Benefits of bare metal restore
Bare metal restore offers several critical advantages that make it a go-to solution for full system recovery, especially when uptime and data integrity are on the line.
- Comprehensive recovery: Restores the entire system, including the OS, applications, settings, and data, ensuring a complete recovery.
- Reduced downtime: Speeds up the recovery process, allowing systems to be back online faster compared to traditional methods.
- Hardware flexibility: Allows restoration to different hardware configurations, provided compatibility is maintained.
- Simplified disaster recovery: Streamlines the recovery process, making it more straightforward and less error-prone.
Challenges and considerations
While BMR offers numerous advantages, there are some considerations to keep in mind:
- Hardware compatibility: Restoring to different hardware may require additional drivers or configurations to ensure compatibility.
- Backup integrity: The success of a BMR depends on the quality and completeness of the backup image. Regular testing and validation are essential.
- Storage requirements: BMR backups can be large, necessitating sufficient storage capacity and management.
Bare metal restore alternatives
What if BMR is not right for you? Here are a few alternatives to consider:
1. File-level restore
File-level restore focuses on recovering individual files or folders rather than the entire system. This approach is faster and more lightweight than BMR. It’s ideal for recovering specific data but not for rebuilding a completely failed system. This can be ideal for restoring for one user account, though in many cases, databases would be stored in a separate location than the user’s home directory
2. Virtual machine (VM) recovery
Virtual machine recovery allows systems to be restored onto virtualized environments instead of physical hardware. Compared to BMR, this method offers greater flexibility since the virtual environment can emulate different hardware configurations. VM recovery is especially useful for disaster recovery plans and test environments but may not be practical if virtualization infrastructure isn’t available.
3. Cloud backup and recovery
Cloud-based recovery solutions restore data and applications directly from cloud storage. While not as fast or hardware-specific as BMR, cloud recovery is convenient and scalable, making it suitable for businesses using off-site backups. However, it may require significant bandwidth for large-scale recovery efforts and might not fully replicate system configurations like BMR.
4. Disk cloning and imaging
Disk cloning creates an exact copy of a disk that can be deployed to new hardware, similar to BMR. However, cloning is typically done before a failure occurs, whereas BMR often works with backups taken at regular intervals. Cloning is quicker for immediate hardware replacement but lacks the flexibility to adapt to different hardware setups.
5. Incremental and differential backups
Incremental and differential backups save changes made since the last backup, allowing you to restore recent data without rebuilding the entire system. Unlike BMR, these methods focus on preserving data rather than creating a full system recovery. They’re efficient for recovering specific files or recent work but insufficient for catastrophic system failure.
Getting started with bare metal restore
Bare metal restore stands out for its ability to restore an entire system—including the operating system, software, and settings—directly onto new hardware. There are alternatives, but they typically address specific recovery needs, such as restoring individual files, leveraging virtualization, or using cloud storage.
If you or your organization is using or considering bare metal servers, and security and reliability are concerns, Liquid Web can help. Our metal solutions come with dedicated IP addresses, DDoS attack protection, and more.
Click through below to explore all of the bare metal solutions we offer. Or start a chat to get answers to your specific questions and hear from our expert support team.
Additional resources
What is bare metal? →
A complete beginner’s guide to help you understand what it is, how it works, basic terminology, and much more
What is bare metal programming? →
Benefits, challenges, use cases, and more
Bare metal vs hypervisors →
What they are, how they’re different, and how to choose
Amy Moruzzi is a Systems Engineer at Liquid Web with years of experience maintaining large fleets of servers in a wide variety of areas—including system management, deployment, maintenance, clustering, virtualization, and application level support. She specializes in Linux, but has experience working across the entire stack. Amy also enjoys creating software and tools to automate processes and make customers’ lives easier.