Windows integrated bare metal recovery

With the Windows integrated bare metal recovery feature (release 7.4 or higher), you can protect a Windows client’s operating system without having to run bare metal backups or create ISO images for each of your Windows clients. File-level backups run with agent version 7.4 or higher capture the disk metadata necessary for the recovery, and backup systems running release 7.4 or higher contain standard 32-bit and 64-bit ISO images that you can use for the recovery. You can recover a client from eligible file-level backups residing on a Unitrends backup system or replication target running release 7.4 or higher. The destination for the recovery can be a physical or virtual machine.

When you boot the destination machine from the standard ISO, it boots into WinPE 4, a minimal version of Windows used for installations, and the Windows Integrated Bare Metal Recovery Wizard launches to guide you through the recovery. Depending on your operating system and hardware, it might be necessary to add drivers to WinPE and the restored operating system during the recovery. You can use the wizard interface to add drivers.

With integrated BMR, you can restore only critical volumes, so to complete the recovery, you will need to perform file-level recovery to restore files that reside on non-critical volumes. After restoring the critical volumes, injecting any necessary drivers, and configuring network settings on the new machine, you can connect to the Unitrends backup system to restore your files. If, however, all of your data resides on the critical volumes, it is restored through the integrated BMR and the recovery of your failed client is complete.

See the following topics for details about protecting the operating systems of your Windows clients using the integrated bare metal recovery feature: