Working around the XP issue

[BackedDown]

Hi All,

Just a quick question - I know the recommended route for XP is via P2V and backing up with Veeam Agent.

But this is not something I can do easily I am afraid. Also this is something that needs to be done infrequently - Perhaps once every year or 2.

- Can I not just take my XP System hard drive and place it into an Windows 10 workstation as a second HD.

- Then back up that volume with Veeam Agent.... Swap hard drive (ideally SSD) and then restore the image to the new drive.

Doing this for manufacturing systems stuck on XP that cannot be updated due to proprietary software etc.

Thanks for your help and advice.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello,

I know the recommended route for XP is via P2V and backing up with Veeam Agent.

I guess you meant to say to back up it with Veeam Backup & Replication (agentless), since Veeam Agent does not support Windows XP.

- Can I not just take my XP System hard drive and place it into an Windows 10 workstation as a second HD.
- Then back up that volume with Veeam Agent.... Swap hard drive (ideally SSD) and then restore the image to the new drive.

This should, indeed, help you to protect the application data, so in the DR situation you should re-build the XP machine and then restore application data from the volume backup.

Doing this for manufacturing systems stuck on XP that cannot be updated due to proprietary software etc.

Since you cannot upgrade the OS, have you considered just virtualizing this server?

Thank you!

[BackedDown]

Thanks for your reply - much appreciated.

Its an XP workstation running a CNC machine so cannot virtualise unfortuantely.

I was hoping place the existing XP OS hard drive in a windows 10 workstation and then using Veeam Agent backup the disk and then do a full restore and in effect end up with two fully booting disks - one a clone of the other.

Is this the case?

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Paul,

This would not allow you to boot from this volume, since this disk will be marked as "not used during the boot process" due to the fact that you've attached it to another computer as a regular disk (running Win 10). In this case you will only be able to back up application data.

Thanks!