How To Extract Corrupt XP Backup Files To Windows 8 Without NTBackup Utility?

Backup files are considered as the safest alternative for getting back lost/corrupted data. Additionally when you are upgrading your system from a lower version to a higher version, backup files prove to be helpful in migrating the data in a go. But like other data files backup files are also prone to corruption. Consider a situation where you are upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 8. In that case you will need to extract data from the backup files which is a little tricky as XP creates backup using NTBackup which is not the case with Windows 8. Restoring backup created on Windows XP to Windows 8 the will not work out easily.

But there are other methods with the help of which we can extract contents of an XP backup onto Windows 8. The latter part of the article discusses the same and also how to extract corrupt XP backup files to Windows 8.

How Is Backup Created in Windows XP?
In Windows XP backup is created using NTBackup Utility. It is Windows' inbuilt backup solution which was introduced in Windows NT. It creates a backup of files in .bkf file. For scheduling automatic backups it builds a command line string in order to launch itself according to the parameters set by the user. The user can edit this list of files manually. But this utility will not restore corrupted BKF files. Thus, it is clear that using this tool we can create backup of files but cannot check whether is damaged or not.

Backup and Restore Utility in Windows 8
The NTBackup utility deprecated in Windows 8 and was replaced by Backup and Restore. Backup and Restore was introduced by Microsoft Windows to create and restore backups in two ways- File Backup and System Image. The Normal backup stores everything that has been selected for creating backup. In Incremental Backup only those files are stored that are changed after backup. Another way of backup is system image. It is a disk image of all the backed up system stored block by block in a VHD file.

How To Open Windows XP Backup To Windows 8
As mentioned earlier NTBackup utility uses three files to create backup. There is no direct method to restore Windows XP Backup Files in Windows 8 directly. Therefore Microsoft developed a solution with the help of which this can be made possible. This can be done with the help of NTBackup utility files- ntbackup.exe, ntmsapi.dll and vssapi.dll. These files can be downloaded from “nt5backup.cab”. The cab file is a zip file hence the user will need to extract these files. Both the .dll files must be stored in ntbackup.exe file at location

C:\Users\admin\Downloads\NTBackup\ntbackup.exe
Disadvantages
• It will not restore corrupted XP backup files.
• The procedure involves a lot of manual efforts and time investment.

Third Party Alternative
Since there is no manual method available to know how to extract corrupt XP backup files to Windows 8, therefore it is suggested to employ Third party tools for the task. One such tool is the BKF Repair tool. It scans the corrupted backup files in three modes – quick, advanced, and range based. This assures the deep scanning of your corrupted backup files for a better restoration of data, no matter if it is corrupted too.