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

backed up ''Backed Up'' is the second album by the Canadian singer-songwriter Ferron, accompanied by a backing band. Produced by Ferron and Keith Maillard and released in 1978 by her own independent label Lucy Records, it includes early versions of several ...

data Data ( , ) are a collection of discrete or continuous values that convey information, describing the quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted for ...

is available in a form that allows one to restore a

computer A computer is a machine that can be Computer programming, programmed to automatically Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (''computation''). Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic set ...

system from "

bare metal In information technology, bare machine (or bare-metal computer) is a computer which has no operating system. The software executed by a bare machine, commonly called a "bare metal program" or "bare metal application", is designed to interact dir ...

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

software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

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

applications Application may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks ** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a ...

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

virtualization In computing, virtualization (abbreviated v12n) is a series of technologies that allows dividing of physical computing resources into a series of virtual machines, operating systems, processes or containers. Virtualization began in the 1960s wit ...

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

application code This glossary of computer science is a list of definitions of terms and concepts used in computer science, its sub-disciplines, and related fields, including terms relevant to software, data science, and . A ...

to create and restore the disk images.

Examples of software used for bare-metal recovery

The dd utility on a

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

boot CD can be used to copy file systems between

disk images Disc or disk may refer to: * Disk (mathematics), a two dimensional shape, the interior of a circle * Disk storage * Optical disc * Floppy disk Music * Disc (band), an American experimental music band * ''Disk'' (album), a 1995 EP by Moby Other ...

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 International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

VM/370 VM (often: VM/CMS) is a family of IBM virtual machine operating systems used on IBM mainframes System/370, System/390, zSeries, System z and compatible systems, including the Hercules emulator for personal computers. Design The heart of t ...

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.

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

introduced a new backup utility ( Wbadmin) into

Windows Server 2008 Windows Server 2008, codenamed "Longhorn Server" (alternatives: "Windows Vista Server" or "Windows Server Vista"), is the seventh major version of the Windows NT operating system produced by Microsoft to be released under the Windows Server b ...

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 Hyper-V is a native hypervisor developed by Microsoft; it can create virtual machines on x86-64 systems running Windows. It is included in Pro and Enterprise editions of Windows (since Windows 8) as an optional feature to be manually enabled. A ...

virtual machine.

updated the

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

features in the

Windows 8 Windows 8 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012, made available for download via Microsoft ...

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

Examples of software used for bare-metal recovery

Comparison with other data backup and restoration techniques

See also

References