System and method for bare metal restore of a computer over a network
View Patent ↗A system, method and computer program product for providing “bare metal” computer hardware with full operating system capabilities, including: (a) executing software contained in computer hardware read-only memory; (b) transferring software control to a location of a start-up program; (c) performing initialization of devices of the computer hardware; (d) selecting an origin storage device for restoration of an operating system to a destination storage device of the computer hardware; (e) establishing a connection with an origin for restoration of an operating system to the computer hardware; (f) initiating a transfer of the operating system data from selected origin to the computer hardware; (g) performing optional substitution of the computer hardware drivers; (h) performing optional structural modifications to the restored operating system; and (i) restoring the operating system to the computer hardware from a data storage device located either locally or remotely, from full or incremental operating system backup.
1. A method for providing operating system capabilities to computer hardware without an operating system, the method comprising:
(a) starting a first operating system;
(b) transferring control to recovery software;
(c) establishing a network connection to a source storage that includes a second operating system for restoration;
(d) selecting a backup of the second operating system within the source storage, the backup including a file-level backup, an image of file system metadata and operating system boot code;
(e) transferring the second operating system data from the selected source storage to a destination storage device based on a bitmap of data blocks stored in the image;
(f) loading the second operating system on the computer hardware;
(g) modifying the second operating system for configuring its environment and hardware devices; and
(h) substituting drivers, in the second operating system, for the hardware devices.
2. The method of claim 1 , wherein the source storage is a virtual storage device.
3. The method of claim 1 , wherein the restoration of the second operating system is performed from an incremental backup with subsequent merging of full backup data and incremental backup data.
4. The method of claim 3 , wherein the full backup and the incremental backup are block-level backups.
5. The method of claim 3 , wherein the incremental backup is a file-level backup.
6. The method of claim 1 , wherein at least one incremental backup is created from the data blocks written to the destination storage device.
7. The method of claim 1 , wherein the backup is editable, such that data blocks in the backup are replaceable by substitute data blocks, and new data blocks can be added.
8. The method of claim 1 , wherein the destination storage device and the backup form a single address space and are represented by a virtual data storage.
9. The method of claim 1 , further comprising using a graphical user interface to select a backup, out of multiple backups on the source storage device, for booting up.
10. The method of claim 9 , wherein the backups are accessible over a network.
11. The method of claim 1 , wherein computer system service data stored in the backup is updated during the booting.
12. The method of claim 1 , further comprising booting multiple computer systems from the same backup.
13. The system of claim 1 , further comprising evaluation of a bitmap of the source storage device and the destination storage device.
14. The system of claim 1 , further comprising installation and activation of an I/O filter to control device access requests.
15. The system of claim 1 , further comprising installation and activation of a disk level filter.
16. A non-transitory computer useable storage medium having computer executable program logic stored thereon, the computer executable program logic executing on a processor for implementing the steps of claim 1 .
17. A system for providing operating capabilities to computer hardware without an operating system, the system performing the functions of claim 1 .