Backup Migration Considerations

You’ve got every right to be concerned if you are in the position of moving your organization to a new backup solution. Your company’s data is at stake, and few assets are more important to a business. A misstep here can impact everything from daily operations and customer trust to long‑term compliance and your ability to recover from an unexpected outage or cyberattack.

Usually, organizations don’t opt to change backup software because they want to; rather, it’s more likely that they’ve been pushed into the situation due to a specific issue. Perhaps backup jobs are failing more frequently, restore times are no longer acceptable, or you’ve discovered that critical systems and workloads simply aren’t being protected the way you thought they were. In some cases, an audit, a security incident, a lack of adequate support, or perhaps an upcoming infrastructure change forces you to reevaluate your current approach.

Whatever the reason, sometimes change is necessary and for the better. A migration is an ideal opportunity to step back, reassess your backup and recovery strategy as a whole, and align it with how your business actually operates today—not how it looked five years ago. With the right planning, you can move to a solution that is easier to manage, scales with your data growth, supports your compliance needs, and delivers faster, more reliable recoveries when you need them most.

Possible Reasons for a Backup Migration

1. The organization has adopted new technologies that the backup doesn't support
2. Technical support is lacking or non-existent
3. The current solution is too slow / not completing within the backup window
4. The current solution is unable to scale with the data growth
5. The backup solution is no longer supported or being updated
   

Of course, there are many other reasons that it might be time to make a change. Maybe you haven’t even settled on your new backup solution yet, and that’s OK. There’s plenty of preparatory work that can be accomplished in the meantime.

Planning and Analysis

Before you touch a single job or schedule, take a step back and thoroughly assess your current backup environment—whether you believe it’s “working” today or not. Start by documenting where all your data actually lives (on‑premises, remote offices, laptops, cloud applications, etc.) and how it is currently being protected. Is every critical system included? Are backup jobs, schedules, and retention policies clearly documented and consistently followed, or are there gaps and “tribal knowledge” that only one technician understands?

As part of this review, identify and classify your data. Separate information that is essential to day‑to‑day operations from data intended for long‑term archiving or historical reference. This will help you decide what belongs in fast, frequently tested backups versus slower, cost‑optimized storage. Revisit your retention policies and ask whether they still align with current regulatory and contractual requirements. For many organizations, a migration is the right time to tighten retention, close compliance gaps, and remove legacy data that no longer needs to be stored.

You’ll also want to evaluate your existing hardware, network, and storage infrastructure to determine whether it can support the performance, scalability, and security expectations of your new solution. Consider backup windows, restore time objectives, and how much growth you anticipate over the next several years. If moving data to the cloud—or shifting to a hybrid local‑and‑cloud model—is new territory for you, include a careful cost and bandwidth analysis, test initial transfers and restores, and validate that you can reliably meet your recovery objectives under real‑world conditions.

Testing and Training

When we talk about testing, it goes well beyond making sure that a new solution meets your minimum requirements. A structured testing phase should include validating backup and restore jobs across all your key workloads—servers, endpoints, virtual machines, business applications, and cloud data—under real‑world conditions. This means confirming not only that backups complete successfully, but that you can restore individual files, entire systems, and critical applications within your defined RPOs and RTOs. It’s also the right time to verify encryption, access controls, and retention settings so that your new environment supports both your operational needs and your compliance obligations.

A dedicated period of training allows system administrators and technicians to get comfortable with the new solution, which will be necessary for replicating old backup routines or building superior ones in this environment. Use this time to document new workflows, update runbooks, and standardize procedures so that your whole team understands how to monitor jobs, respond to alerts, and perform restores confidently—even under pressure. Hands‑on practice with common and high‑impact scenarios will pay dividends when you’re facing an actual outage or ransomware event.

Forced change can lead to poorly implemented solutions and a lack of preparedness. But embracing change as an opportunity to reexamine your most likely data‑loss scenarios, and preparing your restore response can make the difference between a quick recovery and significant damage. Walk through “what‑if” situations—lost endpoints, failed storage, corrupted databases, or a compromised site—and map them to clear recovery playbooks in your new platform. The more you test these scenarios up front, the more predictable your outcomes will be when something goes wrong, and the easier it becomes to demonstrate resilience and compliance to leadership, auditors, and customers alike.

We invite you to download a whitepaper that aims to make your transition to a new backup as smooth as possible.

Download NovaBACKUP’s Tips for Backup Solution Migration today for a closer look at the things you should be thinking about well in advance.

NovaBACKUP’s team of backup engineers works side-by-side with system administrators, assisting with backup solution migrations so that customers are never left to “go it alone”.

Start testing a NovaBACKUP solution in your environment today.