Bare Metal Recovery Setup

We configure full system image backups using Clonezilla, Veeam, or Relax-and-Recover (ReaR) depending on your environment. Images capture the entire disk — OS, configurations, application binaries, and data. Incremental images run nightly with weekly full images. Images are compressed and encrypted before offsite storage. A single image file contains everything needed to rebuild the server from bare hardware.

For infrastructure-as-code environments, the best bare metal recovery is automated provisioning. We ensure your Ansible playbooks, Puppet manifests, or Terraform configurations can rebuild any server from scratch. Configuration is stored in Git, secrets in Vault, and data in backup storage. The server itself becomes disposable — rebuild it in 20 minutes from code rather than restoring a 500GB image.

We create bootable USB or PXE boot recovery images that contain the recovery tools, network configuration, and credentials needed to initiate a restore. For cloud environments, we maintain AMIs or VM templates that serve the same purpose. Recovery media is updated monthly and tested quarterly. When a server dies at 3 AM, the on-call engineer boots the recovery media and follows the runbook — no special knowledge required.

We test bare metal recovery by provisioning identical hardware (or a VM matching the hardware spec), restoring the latest image, and validating that all services start correctly. Network configuration, storage mounts, cron jobs, and application health checks are all verified. Recovery time is measured and compared against RTO targets. Test results are documented with timestamps and any issues encountered during the restore.