Avoid costly PC downtime with the help of bootable media

Building a rescue kit on bootable media is one of the cheapest and most effective ways to ensure that a PC failure doesn’t result in costly downtime in front-office, back-office and operational technology (OT) production environments.

If you have ever accidentally deleted a file or folder from your PC, you are probably grateful for backup. With a good business backup tool, it’s a simple matter to restore the missing file or folder from a backup archive and get back to work. But what happens when your PC locks up or crashes and doesn’t come back to life after a reboot? Suddenly, you can’t access your critical business applications and data. What do you do next?

There are plenty of reasons for concern. You may suffer hours or days of downtime while you fix the problem, and lose hours or days of work since your last backup. If the PC is a critical cog in a business process, that downtime and lost data can mean missed sales opportunities, unhappy customers and even compliance violations.

If the PC is an OT system — like those used in industries such as manufacturing, energy and utilities, food and beverage, and critical infrastructure sectors like water and waste management — the automated processes it controls might grind to a halt, leading to a production outage costing tens of thousands of dollars per hour.

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If this happens, you will be grateful that you have prepared a bootable recovery environment to help restore your system. Also known as a rescue media kit, bootable media is a removable storage device —  a USB drive in newer PCs or a DVD or CD in older ones — loaded with an operating system and recovery tools you can use to boot up the system and get it running again. Bootable media can help you recover from PC failures due to causes that include:

• A hard drive that has developed bad sectors.

• An OS or file system rendered inoperable by corruption from a failed update or the accidental deletion of key components.

• A ransomware attack that has encrypted critical files.

Using Acronis Cyber Protect to create a rescue kit produces a bootable recovery environment that includes either Linux or the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) plus the Acronis Backup Agent. You’ll have to reconfigure your firmware so the system launches from the bootable media.

After rebooting from the bootable media, Acronis’ backup agent will restore the system’s OS, applications and data from a backup archive. Your business or OT processes can then resume operation in a matter of minutes, not hours or days. This is especially useful in environments where there is no IT staff on-site, where IT staff is far away enough that dispatching them to the site would further delay recovery, and / or where the environment is air gapped for security reasons, limiting IT’s use of remote management tools.

Bootable media can help in other ways, too. For example, if your PC cannot be restored because an electrical power surge damaged its motherboard, your fastest recovery option may be to restore the system to a new PC via a process known as bare-metal recovery, using a feature called Acronis Universal Restore.

In this process, after you reboot the new system from your Acronis bootable media, the Acronis backup agent will copy the image of the old PC from the backup archive to the new PC. Again, this is highly useful in locations where IT staff isn’t readily available or cannot access your location with remote management tools.

Bootable media can also be used to perform backup operations on PCs where it is problematic to install a backup agent. This can be helpful for older systems that cannot spare the CPU, memory and disk capacity required to run a backup agent. Additionally, it’s useful in environments where agent installation is avoided over concerns about potential cybersecurity issues, compliance certifications or software conflicts.

PCs are one of the greatest productivity tools ever invented, but they are vulnerable to failures caused by hardware and software problems, cybersecurity attacks and human error. The resulting downtime can hurt your business — especially in OT environments where production outages are extremely expensive. One simple, cost-effective way to prevent extended outages from PC failures is the use of rescue kits on bootable media. These can enable faster PC recovery, even in remote and air-gapped locations where IT assistance is not readily available.

Acronis Cyber Protect: How to create a bootable media: https://care.acronis.com/s/article/Acronis-Cyber-Backup-12-5-Acronis-Cyber-Protect-15-how-to-create-a-bootable-media?language=en_US

Starting Acronis product from USB flash drive: https://care.acronis.com/s/article/1526-Starting-Acronis-product-from-USB-flash-drive?language=en_US

Acronis Bootable Media Types: https://care.acronis.com/s/article/Acronis-Bootable-Media-Types?language=en_US

How to Download Acronis bootable media ISO: https://care.acronis.com/s/article/4828-How-to-download-Acronis-bootable-media-ISO?language=en_US

Acronis Cyber Protect: How to back up with bootable media: https://care.acronis.com/s/article/62531-Acronis-Cyber-Backup-12-5-how-to-back-up-with-bootable-media?language=en_US