Many organizations are moving from legacy backup estates to modern platforms. The biggest risk is not the new platform — it is losing recoverability, retention or legal holds during the transition.
Before you migrate
- Inventory every client, policy and retention rule.
- Identify legal holds and long-term retention obligations.
- Decide what to migrate, what to age out and what to keep readable on the old platform.
During the migration
- Run old and new in parallel for a defined period.
- Prove restores on the new platform for every workload class.
- Track licensing and capacity so parallel running does not overrun budgets.
After the migration
- Document the retirement plan for legacy data.
- Confirm compliance requirements are still met.
- Decommission cleanly and wind down licenses.
Why it matters: a migration that quietly breaks a legal hold or a 7-year retention rule can be far more costly than the project itself.
Typical migration phases
- Discover — inventory clients, policies, retention and dependencies.
- Design — target architecture, retention mapping and cut-over approach.
- Pilot — migrate a representative set of workloads and prove restores.
- Migrate — move remaining workloads in waves with parallel running.
- Retire — expire or archive legacy data and decommission hardware and licenses.
Clear exit criteria for each phase — such as successful test restores for every workload class — stop projects drifting and keep parallel-running costs under control.
Key takeaways
- Map retention and legal-hold obligations first.
- Validate restores on the new platform before switching off the old.
- Plan the end-of-life of legacy data, not just the cut-over.
Planning a platform change?
Our Backup & Recovery Modernization service keeps recoverability intact from first workload to final decommission.
