Typically, the backed up data includes the necessary operating system, applications and data components to rebuild or restore the backed up system to an entirely separate piece of hardware.
The disk image application itself can include an entire operating system, bootable from a live CD or network file server, which contains all the required application code to create and restore the disk images.
These disk images can then be used as input to a new partition of the same type but equal or larger size, or alternatively a variety of virtualization technologies as they often represent a more accessible but less efficient representation of the data on the original partition.
The IBM VM/370 operating system provides a command by the name of "ddr," for disk dump and restore.
Microsoft introduced a new backup utility (Wbadmin) into Windows Server 2008 family of operating system in 2008 which has built-in support for bare-metal recovery.