What are the best practices for archiving data from old systems?

I generally leave it up to the application owners to decide what to do with their data. If something is critical, it should definitely be moved to the new system.

This is a complex issue in business software. Ideally, you’d migrate the old data into the new systems since users don’t want to change how they access old data. But the migration workload can be tough to get approved. I once saw a situation where a legacy system had to be maintained for an extra year after a switch, and it was a nightmare trying to get all historical data exported before the cut-off. OpenText InfoArchive might be a good fit, offering search capabilities and insights.

When you're looking to archive, if the data is still accessible on demand, especially if it's in a proprietary format, it might not be truly archived. The evaluation really depends on how the application stored its data and files. You might need to keep the old application running in a read-only mode just to maintain that queryability. Can you provide more details on what you need the data for? Different archive options vary based on data availability, cost, volume, and compliance requirements.

For my backups, I handle emails and attachments with a standard email server setup, and for databases, I use dedicated backup tools. Everything else is managed with traditional backup methods. I compress and encrypt the entire backup and keep two copies on different servers in various locations for safety.

Have you considered your data retention policy? Why are you holding onto this data instead of destroying it? If the platforms are no longer useful, the data they hold might not be either.