

This type of recovery is called bare-metal recovery. Image recovery to the machine without an installed operating system.If one of your drives has failed or you’ve experienced a critical file system error, you can recover only the needed partitions from the system image backup, without the need to reboot the whole system. This saves time when you need to restore a folder, instead of a whole machine. Recovery of the selected files or folders from the image.

There are several options for performing recoveries from image-based backup.

In most cases, image-based backup and system image backup are interchangeable terms. “System image backup” is a general term frequently used by Microsoft. Recovery from image-based backup is usually much faster than applying system settings from scratch and manually recreating the unique data structure that existed on your computer at the time of the backup.įurther reading System Image Backup Guide Image-based backup entails backing up the whole system, including disks structure, system settings and the operating system itself. Below in this article, we will discuss why you don’t need this method for Windows desktops. System state backup is a technology built for Windows servers. Besides, this type of backup and recovery does not include user files or other data.įurther reading System State Backup Guide You can, however, use it with virtual machines as long as the virtual hardware profiles of the backup and recovery machines are identical. However, the time you spend to plan and execute system backup and restore for different types of systems can vary significantly. Thus, you cannot use system state backup for bare-metal recovery to a different type of server. System state backup covers significantly fewer files than the image-based backup, and can, therefore, be run more often. It supports the backup and recovery of files and settings that are critical for the system’s operation. System state backup is a Microsoft proprietary technology. File-level recovery works similarly: You choose the files to recover, and recover them.įurther reading File Backup Best Practices System State Backup and Recovery It involves preserving files by making copies of them. File-Level Backup and Recoveryįile-level backup is the first item that comes into mind when most people think of data backup. We will discuss methods of file-level, application-aware and full system backup and restore. This article provides an overview of ways to back up your Windows computer.
