Recovering from a catastrophic disaster can be a time and labor intensive task. Typically new hardware must be acquired and installed. The environment of the machine, including the operating system and applications, needs to be restored to the new hardware. Only then can backed up data be restored. You can configure your regular backups so you can accomplish disaster recovery from your backup media, quickly and easily, using theYosemite Server Backup Bare Metal Disaster Recovery (BMDR) agent.
The BMDR agent recovers your machine by booting it from bootable media, repartitioning its disks, and then restoring the machine’s data. Bootable media, or boot images, which include a minimal operating system, device drivers, and your backup software, are created by properly configuring your regular backup. During a backup of your system, you can:
- create a boot image of any machine in the backup domain
- save or update the boot image in the catalog
- save the ISO image to a file or burn the boot image (of the media server) to the beginning of your backup media.
While you need boot media of your backup server on hand for disaster recovery, for all other machines in your backup domain, an updated boot image which can be burned to media, along with fully backed up data, is sufficient preparation for disaster recovery.
Once the machine boots, you can restore your backup data from a locally attached backup device. For clients running supported operating systems, the restore can be run over the network. Some final steps to restore third-party data and any incremental or differential backups complete the recovery of the machine.
To effectively use the BMDR agent you must prepare for disaster and test your preparations periodically.