Bare metal backup and recovery can be an extremely important element of your backup and recovery strategy. There are a lot of different solutions available, each with their own individual advantages.
What is Bare Metal Backup?
Bare metal backup is a process of backing up your entire system’s data, and it’s not just user data and settings – the entire system, including drivers, programs, information structure, even the OS itself.
There are quite a lot of advantages of such a method – that’s why currently more traditional file backup solutions are being slowly replaced with newer types of solutions, like bare metal backup.
Bare Metal Recovery (or Bare Metal Restore)
The other half of this solution type is bare metal restore (it’s called bare metal recovery, too). This one implies the process of recovering all of the backed up data to completely new “bare” hardware, with all the settings, drivers and other things like OS completely intact.
Some of the biggest advantages of this solution type are: speed, easiness, safety, etc.
For example, bare metal recovery can be comparitively fast – since there’s no requirement to restore a particular piece of data, and the process is actually restoring everything; from drivers and registry, to desktop icon layout, with no need to install all the drivers and programs from scratch.