We have an important announcement to make regarding our support for old operating systems.
As of 1st May 2020, we will be discontinuing to provide technical support for BackupAssist running on Operating Systems that Microsoft don’t themselves support.
We have several reasons for this:
- Our focus for 2020 and beyond is delivering cyber-resilience. The cyber landscape has changed dramatically in the last 2 years – hacking and ransomware are the biggest threats, and all our efforts and resources are now directed to protecting against tomorrow’s threats instead of supporting yesterday’s systems.
- For these systems, Microsoft won’t provide further support themselves. This means if you have a problem that needs escalation to Microsoft, we simply won’t be able to provide that support.
- Microsoft recommends running only recent versions of their systems for security reasons. We agree that many successful hacking incidents are caused by running old and unpatched systems. With our message of cyber-resilience, we recommend that old systems be retired and replaced with new ones.
The list of systems for which we can no longer offer technical support are:
- Microsoft Windows 7
- Microsoft Windows 8
- Microsoft Windows Server 2008 family
- Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 family
We understand that in some circumstances, you may still need to run old operating systems and servers – and these of course need to be backed up. You can still use older versions of BackupAssist on these older systems, but our technical support staff won’t be able to assist in the case of problems. Older versions of BackupAssist also do not contain our CryptoSafeGuard anti-ransomware features, so we do recommend upgrading as soon as you can to improve your cyber-resilience.
We trust that you see that it makes the most sense for us to invest our efforts and resources into protecting tomorrow’s threats and that you understand our reasoning for discontinuing support for extremely old servers and systems.
Regards,
Jason Schultz
Product Manager
