Bare-Metal Restore to Another Hard Drive
Question
When you have a server failure, can you do a BMR on another server with drives of different sizes than the original? How well does BMR support changes in number, capacity, and model of hard drives?
Solution
The CDP Server doesn't have any concerns regarding the hard disks, as long as they are of equal or greater size than the originals.
We've seen lots of cases where backups have been restored to larger disks, and afterwards the partitions and file systems were resized using a tool like gParted.
The only time hardware is really a factor is if you're restoring to something with a completely different drive controller (for example), and the OS that you're restoring doesn't have a driver installed for that controller. Even this can usually be fixed with a "repair install" (Windows) or "mkinitrd" (Linux).