Bare Metal Recovery

If the operating system on your machine fails to start, you can perform bare metal recovery of your system. To do this, you must have Veeam Recovery Media that you created on your functional system and a full backup with system metadata.

At the first stage of bare metal recovery, you must boot your machine from Veeam Recovery Media which launches the recovery image OS in your machine RAM. You then import the backup file into the Veeam Agent database, select restore method and run the restore. Veeam Agent erases all data on the machine, reconstructs partition structure using system metadata, restores data from the backup and creates the boot loader.

Before you reboot the machine upon successful bare metal recovery, you may need to restore additional data from another backup. To do this, you can use the standard file-level restore functionality. Veeam Agent mounts the backup file to the file system of the recovery image OS. After that, you can copy the necessary files or directories to a desired location.

If the recovery is successful, upon reboot the system loads the recovered OS and data from the machine’s hard drive.

Considerations and Limitations for Bare Metal Recovery

Bare metal recovery to dissimilar hardware is not supported.

Bare metal recovery from backups created from within WPARs is not supported.

Bare metal recovery only from file-level backups created by version 4.0.0.891 (or later) of Veeam Agent for IBM AIX is supported.

Bare metal recovery requires a backup that includes the full contents of the root directory (the --includedirs option must be set to /).

Paths longer than 1006 symbols cannot be restored during bare metal recovery and must be restored manually afterwards.

[For flexible mapping] To avoid possible OS inconsistency after restore, rootvg must be restored as a whole volume group.

[For flexible mapping] Logical volumes can be restored only to their local copy on the current system.
[For flexible mapping] During restore, Veeam Agent ignores mirrored copies of logical volumes.
During bare metal recovery, access (atime), modified (mtime) and changed (ctime) timestamps are reset for all non-empty files and directories.

Related Task

Performing Bare Metal Recovery