Rebuilding an entire Mac from scratch onto new or wiped hardware.
A bare-metal restore reconstructs an entire system — applications, user data, settings, permissions — onto empty hardware from nothing but the backup.
The scenario is the one nobody wants to rehearse: a laptop is stolen, a drive dies, a spilled coffee ends a MacBook Pro’s career. You walk into the Apple Store, buy a new machine, and need the old one back. A bare-metal restore is the path from a factory-sealed Mac to a working environment that looks, behaves, and contains exactly what the old one did — same Desktop layout, same Photos library, same 600 GB of project files, same SSH keys, same dotfiles.
This is distinct from a granular restore, which pulls a single file or folder. Bare-metal is all of it, at once, to a machine that currently has nothing. The time it takes is governed by download bandwidth and the size of the repository: roughly two hours per 100 GB on a good gigabit connection, longer on hotel Wi-Fi. Plan accordingly.
In macup, a bare-metal restore starts from the recovery screen on a fresh Mac — sign in, enter your passphrase or recovery code, pick the device snapshot you want to restore from, and macup streams the full tree back into place while you make coffee. A 500 GB setup is typically usable in a few hours on a fast home connection.