Windows image-based bare metal recovery
With Windows image-based bare metal recovery (BMR), you protect an asset’s operating system by creating a custom ISO-image and running bare metal backups that capture the disk metadata. You perform DR by using the asset's custom ISO and a bare metal backup. The target for the recovery can be a physical or virtual machine.
Note: For most assets, you can recover from regular file-level or image-level backups by using Windows unified bare metal recovery. It is recommended to use unified bare metal recovery where possible. To determine which to use for your asset, see Which bare metal method should I use?.
How image-based BMR works
When you boot the recovery target machine from the asset's custom ISO, it boots into WinPE, a minimal version of Windows used for installations, and the Windows Bare Metal Interface displays. You use this interface to perform the recovery. Depending on your operating system and hardware, it might be necessary to add drivers during or after the recovery. The recovery procedures guide you through this process.
Image-based BMR recovers only critical volumes, so to complete the recovery, you need to recover the last file-level backup to restore files that reside on non-critical volumes. After recovering the critical volumes, injecting any necessary drivers, and configuring network settings on the new machine, you use the backup appliance to recover the last file-level backup to the new machine. (If all of your data resides on the critical volumes, it is recovered during BMR and you don't need to recover the last backup by using the backup appliance.)
See the following topics for details about protecting your Windows assets with image-based bare metal recovery:
| • | Implementing image-based bare metal protection |
| • | Performing image-based bare metal recovery |