November 15, 2012
JG Heithcock is GM at Retrospect and has eighteen years experience in the storage and backup industry.
A partner from the UK asks:
How does Dissimilar Hardware Restore work?
Retrospect 8 for Windows introduces an add-on that provides a new level of restore flexibility: The Dissimilar Hardware Restore add-on makes it almost trivial to perform a complete bare-metal restore or disaster recovery to a completely different computer.
Now, when a Windows server or PC fails, Retrospect can boot the replacement computer—whether it’s a newer model of the same design or even from a completely different manufacturer—and perform a complete restore, including the operating system, apps, registry entries, and so on. At the end of the process, the Dissimilar Hardware Restore add-on adjusts the drivers to account for differences in the hardware automatically.
Without this technology, performing this kind of restore is challenging, and it often ends up being a time-consuming process involving the migration of user data and reinstalling applications. Now it can be quick and painless, and everything gets restored