Bare-metal recovery (BMR) part of a disaster recovery plan that provides protection when a machine cannot start, and you must recover everything. Disaster situations include hardware failure and cyberattacks.

You can use BMR when your host is not available due to a hardware failure, or it cannot start. Use BMR for either of the following reasons:

• You want to recover a computer in its entirety after a hardware failure that has been repaired.
• You want to recover data to a new computer after a hardware failure that cannot be repaired. The new computer does not have an operating system, and the operating-system files must also be recovered from the old computer.

By default, each BMR backup is system state enabled.

BMR data consists of the following:

• The operating system files and all data except user data on critical volumes

Note: Critical volumes include the boot volume, the system volume, and the volume that hosts system state data, such as Active Directory and application services.             

• All system state information

You can use BMR for the following operations:

• Physical machine to physical machine (P2P)
• Physical machine to virtual machine (P2V)
• Virtual machine to virtual machine (V2V)

To protect a Windows host entirely, we recommend that you back up BMR data for critical volumes and separately back up regular assets that contain user data.

Before you perform a BMR, verify that the environment meets the requirements and that you have the necessary information.

Note: For bare-metal recovery requirements, see the PowerProtect Data Manager File System User Guide.