Bare Metal Backup and Recovery for Small Business Networks

Introduction

Putting The Pedal To Bare Metal

Bare metal backup and recovery (BMBR) products are a great solution for small businesses. The best allow you to backup and then restore servers and sometimes networked workstations at either the level of discrete files or the entire disk volume. When you restore a disk volume to a new empty disk drive, you're doing what is called "bare metal recovery" or "disaster recovery." Most products let you restore to a drive temporarily mounted in any computer. Most also let you boot your original repaired computer off a CD-ROM and restore your disk drive from CD-ROM, a second disk drive connected to the computer, a disk on the network or, in some cases, tape. Bare metal recoveries save lots of time - they can take less than one-sixth the time of a discrete file recovery.

"Ah," I can hear you saying, "Don't bare metal backup solutions cost a lot of money?" That can be true if you're buying a solution for a large networked environment, using a complex backup product with special modules for bare metal backup and recovery. However, there are very reasonably priced bare metal products designed specifically for the small and medium-sized business market.

I have made some assumptions in writing this piece:

  1. Your computer system has around 12 users
  2. You are working in a Microsoft Windows Server Environment (2000 or 2003)
  3. You have a single server to backup, preferably Microsoft Windows Small Business Server
  4. You are running Microsoft SQL Server and/or Exchange Server
  5. You want to backup networked user workstations.

Now sit back, relax and let me show you how bare metal solutions can help bring you more peaceful nights.