Bare metal restore
Recovering an entire system, including operating system and configuration, onto hardware with nothing on it.
This is what you need after a server is destroyed or encrypted. File-level backups alone will not do it, because reinstalling and reconfiguring the operating system and applications can take days.
Image-based backup with the ability to restore to different hardware, or to boot directly as a virtual machine, is what makes the recovery time realistic.
Where this comes up
Bare metal restore sits inside our backup and disaster recovery work. If you are trying to work out what this means for your own environment rather than in the abstract, that is the page worth reading next, and a short call will get you a straight answer faster than either.