Patent ID: 8145936

Claim:
A method for recovering a computing appliance to a previous operational state after a failure, comprising: creating a disaster recovery medium, wherein the disaster recovery medium includes: a configuration bundle, wherein the configuration bundle includes; a system database; meta data associated with the computing appliance; and one or more configuration files; and one or more software packages installed on the computing appliance; running, automatically upon detecting connection of the disaster recovery medium to the computing appliance; an initialization program on the computing appliance to reach a first operational state; accessing the disaster recovery medium from the computing appliance, wherein accessing includes reading portions of the database, the metadata and the configuration files and storing the portions read to a storage medium on the computing appliance; installing the software packages on the computing appliance to reach a second operational state, wherein installing includes reading, by the computing appliance, the software packages from the disaster recovery medium; and applying, from within the computing appliance, portions of the configuration bundle stored on the computing appliance to restore the computing appliance to the previous operational state.