For those bound on risk I wonder if the removed USB port is possible to be soldered back to copy over these files. Probably the biggest risk would be warranty wise?
Should be a lot safer just to buy another BBB & copy the image over.
huh? it's simple enough using putty, why would we need a bbb?... lol
his code is stored in RAM anyway... right?
a cold restart works fine.... at least it did for my 3 sats...
the location of the .factory file was mentioned early on... surely folks made a backup of it?
can't use putty if the machine won't come up on the network due to deleted critical files. And since the USB has been disabled...the number of choices is sort of whittled down. Best solution is to, of course, not delete the files in the first place

And how does one restore said backup if one can't access the machine

Cklovas nor any rep never ever instructed anyone to erase the .factory files.
Don't know why someone would do such a thing.