Abstract: The invention generally describes a system and method for data backup and recovery, in particular for backing up an entire server (i.e., system state and data) in substantially real-time. The invention provides high availability by failing a source server over to a target server if the source server fails, where the target server is reconfigured nearly identically to the source server. The invention does not require the source and target servers to have identical hardware or operating system versions. The invention further allows for rapid, automatic, restoration of a source server.