Bare Metal or Volume level restore for corrupted installation or bad updates, etc?

[TaylorB]

After a decade of doing VM restores, I have started doing some critical physical server backups. I am trying make sure I understand the restore process.

If the computer won't boot, obviously that's a bare-metal restore. If I just lose a folder of files, that's a file level. But what about a scenario where windows is running fine, but you broke a critical production service through a bad upgrade and you need to revert. Can I just restore the C: drive through a volume level restore? Do I need to bare metal restore?

For VMs in this scenario, we would do a Full VM restore and be back in minutes. So we are looking for the closest analog to doing that on a physical server.

Thanks.

[vnikiforov]

Hello, Taylor,

Yes, you can restore a system volume, but it still requires a bare-metal recovery if you're using a physical computer.
Here is the relevant part from the User's Guide Limitations for Volume-Level Restore