When a mid-size public school district learned that Windows 10 was reaching end of life in October 2025, their IT director had one question: how many of our databases are going to break?
The answer was sobering. Twenty years of administrative history, stored in 500+ legacy .mdb files spread across the district's network shares. Student scheduling tools. Staff payroll supplements. Maintenance work-order tracking. IEP compliance logs. None of it had been migrated. All of it was at risk.
They had four months. No migration consultant budget. And a skeleton IT team of three.
Jefferson County Schools (name changed) operates 14 schools serving roughly 9,200 students. Like most public school districts, their IT infrastructure grew organically over decades: Access databases were created by individual departments as needs arose, never consolidated, never formally documented.
The district had a single IT director and two technicians. They managed everything — device provisioning, network maintenance, helpdesk, security patching — in addition to this migration project.
The consultant quotes they received ranged from $38,000 to $62,000. That money didn't exist in their budget. And even if it had, the timeline was unrealistic: the cheapest bid estimated 14 weeks for discovery and assessment alone.
"We couldn't spend $50,000 on a consultant and we couldn't wait 14 weeks. We needed to know what we had, then deal with it ourselves."
— IT Director, Jefferson County Schools
Before a single database could be migrated, they needed to know what existed. No central inventory. No documentation. Just a list of network share paths and a rough sense that "a lot of .mdb files are out there somewhere."
LegacyLeaps's free scanner ran across the mapped network drives and produced a report in 23 minutes:
That report became the foundation of the migration plan. What had been an overwhelming unknown became a categorized, prioritized list.
LegacyLeaps scans your network drives and produces the same report — VBA complexity, linked tables, file size, access frequency — in under 30 minutes.
Download the Free ScannerWith the scanner report in hand, the IT director sorted the work into four tiers:
| Tier | Criteria | Count | Approach |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 — Archive | Not accessed in 12+ months, no linked tables | 127 files | Copy as-is, document location, exclude from migration |
| Tier 2 — Simple Convert | No VBA, no linked tables | 218 files | Batch convert with LegacyLeaps (no review needed) |
| Tier 3 — Convert + Verify | VBA present but no linked tables | 83 files | Convert with LegacyLeaps, spot-check VBA modules |
| Tier 4 — High-Touch | VBA + linked tables, or high-complexity | 86 files | Convert individually, re-link tables, full UAT |
Total active files to migrate: 387. Total high-touch files requiring significant IT time: 86. The rest could be converted efficiently in batches.
Scanner run. Report reviewed. Migration tiers assigned. 127 archive files documented and excluded. Stakeholder communication sent to department heads: "We're migrating your databases before October. Here's what changes and what doesn't."
218 simple .mdb files converted overnight using LegacyLeaps's batch mode. Morning review: all 218 opened correctly. Record counts matched across the board. Zero issues.
83 VBA-containing databases converted in two batches. Technician reviewed VBA modules in 12 highest-priority files. One database had a PtrSafe declaration issue on a Windows API call — fixed manually in 20 minutes. All 83 files verified and deployed.
86 complex databases migrated individually. Linked table paths re-established using LegacyLeaps's table re-linking tool. Department owners conducted user acceptance testing. Three databases required VBA form updates for ActiveX control compatibility. All 86 signed off by week 6.
All 387 migrated databases verified against the original record counts using LegacyLeaps's validation report. Pilot group of 40 staff on Windows 11 ran the databases for two weeks. No reported issues. Rollout approved.
Seven weeks from discovery to completed migration. All 387 active databases converted to .accdb. All records preserved. All VBA modules functional. All linked tables reconnected.
The district completed the Windows 11 rollout across all 14 schools in October — on schedule, without database incidents, and without the $50,000 consultant budget they didn't have.
"The scanner report changed the whole conversation. Suddenly we weren't guessing — we had a number. 514 files, 387 active, 86 that needed real attention. We could plan around that."
— IT Director, Jefferson County Schools
Three things separated this district's successful migration from the typical Access database horror story:
The scanner ran before anyone made decisions. Most migration projects fail because teams underestimate scope. This team started with exact numbers.
Not every database needs the same treatment. Treating all 514 files as "high-touch" would have burned the team. The scanner report made differentiation possible.
LegacyLeaps's validation report compared record counts in the converted .accdb against the original .mdb for every single database. When the numbers matched, the team could deploy with confidence. No manual spot-checking of thousands of records.
Windows 10 reached end of life in October 2025. Organizations still running Windows 10 are operating without security patches. The path to Windows 11 runs through your legacy databases — and the earlier you start the inventory, the more time you have to handle the complex ones properly.
The free scanner takes less than 30 minutes on a typical network share. The report it produces is the same one that gave this IT team their migration plan.
Run the free scan on your network drives. Get a full inventory — file counts, VBA complexity, linked tables, access frequency — before you commit to any migration approach.
Download the Free ScannerOr talk to us about a done-for-you migration for larger environments.