RBS Bare Metal Restore Utility

What is RBSBMR?

RBSBMR is a stand-alone Bare Metal Backup/Restore utility. It will copy an entire hard drive, block by block, to another drive as a Microsoft Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) file that can be mounted as a drive using Windows 7, MS Virtual Server, and any driver capable of mounting a VHD file (like the free Gizmo)

How will I use it?

Service Providers will use RBSBMR to offer an onsite quick full system DR solution as an add-on service, charging a fee for the service.

RBSBMR is designed to give your end users an additional layer of onsite protection for their computers. It keeps LOCAL backups of critical servers using network attached storage or USB drives. It is designed as a very quick disaster recovery restore point, restoring a full system including the bootable operating system, to the same computer or a new computer.

Its backup files can also be mounted as virtual hard drives, in many cases allowing your customers to continue business within minutes after a disaster.

How much will it cost?

The final price has not yet been set. It will be available to use for free during the public Beta testing period.

How will RBSBMR integrate with RBackup Online Backup?

RBSBMR is a separate product and will operate independently of RBackup. It can be used with and without RBackup. RBSBMR keeps local copies of hard drives. It does not send backups over the Internet. The backup files it creates are often the same size as the hard drives it backs up, making them cumbersome or impossible to transmit over the Internet in a reasonable amount of time over most commercial upstream internet connections.

Can I send the RBSBMR backups offsite anyway? Sure! If your customer has enough bandwidth, RBackup can send the RBSBMR backup files offsite. You can also write them to a remote hard drive using a VPN.

How does it work?

RBSBMR ALWAYS BACKS UP ENTIRE PHYSICAL DRIVES, including multi-volume drives and multi-format drives. It will restore multiple volumes and formats as well. The utility does not recognize file systems, virtual machines, or any data structure on the drives. It backs up and restores whatever is on the drive, block by block.

Will it support VMWare, Hyper-V, an other Virtual Machines?

It does not recognize the data structure on the drives. It backs up and restore the entire drive, regardless what is on it. If Virtual Machine images are on it, it backs up and restores them. The first version always backs up the entire drive.

What are some if its features?

After mounting the VHD file, you can search through it with Windows Explorer, copying files and running programs as if it were a physical drive.

RBSBMR works with all Windows operating systems Windows 2000 and later. It will not work on Windows 98 or previous. It works with 32-bit and 64-bit. It works with FAT32, exFAT32, NTFS and etx3 file systems.

The image file created by RBSBMR (without the compression function turned on) is usually a few blocks bigger than the drive itself. For example, if you back up a 200GB drive (total size - not data size) the resulting image file might be about 202GB.

RBSBMR can restore to dissimilar hardware. When restoring to dissimilar hardware, restoring a drive will usually result in mismatched drivers. There might be some administrative work to do to make the new drive image work with hardware that is not identical to the original. This usually involves only running CHKDSK /b and installing the right drivers.

The utility can back up active in-use drives.

If the source drive has bad sectors, RBSBMR will try to skip them, writing blank sectors to the target drive. CHKDSK will have to be used to fix the target drive after the restore. We recommend running a utility to scan for and fix bad sectors on the source drive if you suspect it has bad sectors.

RBSBMR does not require Admin rights.

Depending on drive speed, CPU speed, or USB speed, backups and restores can be done in about 120GB per hour or faster.