“Moving beyond BMR half truths...”
Eran Farajun, Asigra

Bare Metal Restore (BMR) is a restore process when the whole machine is being restored. Usually this type of restore is performed after a complete hardware failure or hardware upgrade.

Microsoft recommends using the identical hardware for the destination restore machine. While restoring Windows NT4 machine to different hardware is not possible (unless some initial preparations are made), you can restore Windows 2000 machines to different hardware. However, your restore will only be successful if the differences between the machines were only very minor (different SCSI controller, NIC).

Switching between different computer types (ACPI to standard computer type and vise versa) is not allowed by Microsoft's rules of the world. For more information you can check Microsoft’s knowledge base article number 237556.

Life doesn’t always work the way Microsoft designed it, and in some circumstances it is necessary to perform bare metal restore to a machine of different type (i.e. ACPI to standard). An example of this would be when your 3 years old Dell computer dies and you want to buy a new one from a different manufacturer. If you use traditional backup software, and you’ve attempted to perform a successful restore (not knowing that you can’t), after the reboot you will not be able to start your machine (just ask any CA Brightstor or Tivoli TSM user). Regardless what backup software you are using the result would be the same – your computer would not start properly or at all.

Asigra Televaulting software has solved this particular problem. And Asigra does it agentless. The data can be loaded directly on the new server prior to shipping to the new location or disks can be sent from the central location to eliminate sending data over the WAN.

Asigra’s BMR is simple. And it works. In the words of one of our service providers “Click. Click. Click. System rebooted and ready to load.”