Bare-metal restore is a technique in the field of data recovery and restoration where the

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is available in a form that allows one to restore a

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system from "

bare metal In computer science, bare machine (or bare metal) refers to a computer executing instructions directly on logic hardware without an intervening operating system. Modern operating systems evolved through various stages, from elementary to the pre ...

", i.e. without any requirements as to previously installed

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

. Typically, the backed up data includes the necessary operating system,

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and data components to rebuild or restore the backed up system to an entirely separate piece of hardware. In some configurations, the hardware receiving the restore needs to have an identical configuration to the hardware that was the source of the backup, although

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techniques and careful planning can enable a bare-metal restore to a hardware configuration different from the original. Disk imaging applications enable bare-metal restores by storing copies (images) of the entire contents of hard disks to networked or other external storage, and then writing those images to other physical disks. The disk image application itself can include an entire operating system, bootable from a live CD or network file server, which contains all the required

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to create and restore the disk images.

Examples of software used for bare-metal recovery

The dd utility on a

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boot CD can be used to copy

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s between

disk images A disk image, in computing, is a computer file containing the contents and structure of a disk volume or of an entire data storage device, such as a hard disk drive, tape drive, floppy disk, optical disc, or USB flash drive. A disk image is us ...

and

disk partitions Disk partitioning or disk slicing is the creation of one or more regions on Computer data storage#Secondary storage, secondary storage, so that each region can be managed separately. These regions are called partitions. It is typically the first ...

to effect a bare-metal backup and recovery. These disk images can then be used as input to a new partition of the same type but equal or larger size, or alternatively a variety of

technologies as they often represent a more accessible but less efficient representation of the data on the original partition. The IBM

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operating system provides a command by the name of "ddr," for disk dump and restore. It is a bit by bit backup of a hard drive to a specified media, typically tape, but many choices exist.

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introduced a new backup utility (

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) into

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family of operating system in 2008 which has built-in support for bare-metal recovery. Users of this software can also recover their system to a

Hyper-V Microsoft Hyper-V, codenamed Viridian, and briefly known before its release as Windows Server Virtualization, is a native hypervisor; it can create virtual machines on x86-64 systems running Windows. Starting with Windows 8, Hyper-V superseded Win ...

virtual machine.

updated the

Windows Recovery Environment Windows Preinstallation Environment (also known as Windows PE and WinPE) is a lightweight version of Windows used for the deployment of PCs, workstations, and servers, or troubleshooting an operating system while it is offline. It is intended t ...

features in the

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family of operating system to be set up to provide built-in support for bare-metal recovery.How to Create Recovery Media to Run Push-Button Reset Features
/ref> Microsoft Windows Server 2012 (R2) offers built-in Bare-Metal-Recovery.

Comparison with other data backup and restoration techniques

* Bare-metal restore differs from local disk image restore where a copy of the disk image, and the restoration software, are stored on the computer that is backed up. * Bare-metal restore differs from simple data backups where application data, but neither the applications nor the operating system are backed up or restored as a unit.

References

{{Reflist Backup Backup software