Old Apps Need To Die

If you have an application that is no longer supported by its developer, or an app that will only run on an older version of your operating system, this blog post is for you. That app needs to die, as it’s only a ticking bomb.

What’s wrong with older applications, you say? Technically, the application is fine. It’s just a series of files that need to get backed up. However, the data created by said application can be a real problem. More importantly, using that data in the future can be quite difficult.

Consider an application that only runs on an older version of the operating system. The problem with this application is that it is difficult to back it up. The reason is many backup software products only support the current version of the operating system and maybe a version or two before that. If, however, your application only runs on windows XP or Windows server 2000 – both of which are no longer supported by Microsoft – it may be difficult to find backup software that still runs on this platform. If you can’t get backup software to run on a particular platform, is going to be impossible to properly backup that application.

However, people desperate to continue running their old application resort to desperate measures to back up the application data. They might run a database dump to a network share on a more recent operating system so it can backup the data. Of course you will need to manage the database dump with some sort of scheduling process and will not be part of the typical backup reporting process. That goes without saying.

The problem really comes when the system on which the application is running dies. The database dump is only useful to that application and that application only runs on the operating system it no longer supports. Old operating systems tend to run on older systems that tend to fail. When they fail, you will need to find another system that is still running that older version of the operating system in order to be able to continue to run that application. If you can’t find that, you might have a real problem. Assuming you can get access to the installation media for the older operating system, you’re going to have a difficulty installing that older operating system on newer hardware.

Which takes us back to the title of the post: Old apps need to die. If you have such an application – whether on your laptop or a server – you need to figure out how to kill that application now before it kills you. Yes, I know that means finding a new application. I know the new application won’t be the same as the old application and it will require a migration process and a training process, and the new application will not have some features the old application had and you will miss those features. But those difficulties pale in comparison to the difficulties of missing the data because you can no longer use it in a modern world.

Look around your data center for old versions of operating systems or applications. Find them now and investigate the possibility of migrating them before it’s too late. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

About wcurtispreston

W. Curtis Preston (aka Mr. Backup) is an expert in backup & recovery systems; a space he has been working in since 1993. He has written three books on the subject, Backup & Recovery, Using SANs and NAS, and Unix Backup & Recovery. Mr. Preston is a writer and has spoken at hundreds of seminars and conferences around the world. Preston’s mission is to arm today’s IT managers with truly unbiased information about today’s storage industry and its products.