Moving data can be time-consuming and while you are migrating your initial wave of content, data may change or become out of date by the time you and your users go to access it. This is where delta or partial migrations are useful. A delta migration only moves modified files since the last migration that was executed. This is done by comparing the modified timestamps between the source and destination platforms. There are a couple benefits from using delta migrations, the remainder of this article will touch on a few of these benefits.

Keep files up to date

The primary reason why service providers and companies use delta migrations with Movebot is to ensure that the data has made it across and is up to date prior to teams picking up the new platform. When moving 20 terabytes of data, this isn't going to appear overnight. We recommend, depending on how much data you have, that you do the mass migration a week or two prior to your go-live date.

Once the first wave has completed, we would recommend enabling regular delta migrations (or a sync) to ensure that any modified files have been migrated across. It would typically look something like;

• Wave 1. Initial mass migration, this would move all of your data, content and users across to the new platform.  This is a large-scale migration that will move everything in the cloud and can easily be in the terabytes. 
• Wave 2-n. At 3-4 day intervals run a delta migration (sync) as required until the weekend before going live with the new platform.
• Final cutover. Over the weekend prior to going live of the new platform, run a final delta migration so that all of the data is up to date. After this, users can start working in the new cloud going forward. 

Speed

If you wanted to transfer all of your modified files without a delta migration, you would have to consider running the mass migration again. Depending on how much data you have, this could be time-consuming and may not have all of the updated data migrated across prior to the go live date.

As a delta migration only transfers modified files, the amount of files being transferred is tiny in comparison and can often be transferred in less than an hour. This decreases the time waiting for large datasets to be migrated across and overall increases the speed of adoption. 

Cost

There's a cost with moving data, and the more data you move, the higher that is. Having to continuously do mass migrations in place of delta migrations would be costly and not a productive project. For instance, if you have 1TB of data, without delta migration functionality you'd have to pay to move that 1TB each time, which is costly and time-consuming.

With delta migrations, as you are only moving files that have been modified, often this is only megabytes in place of gigabytes or even terabytes of data. Because you are only moving small amounts of data and only data that has been modified, your overhead and overall cost will be significantly lower. 

Make data moving easy with delta migrations using Movebot

Movebot is a fully cloud-hosted data-moving tool with several useful features, including delta migrations. Delta migrations are a neat feature that saves you time, money, and ensures that productivity is not impacted as the new platform can be adopted quickly and seamlessly by teams as if they were using the same platform.

Check out Movebot for yourself by registering for a free 14-day trial. You can explore the tool, connect data sources, and even gain data insights with Explorer. There's no credit card required and you don't have to jump on a product demo call if you don't want to. Simply sign up and go. Get started with your trial today.