While switching to the new e-commerce platforms or any other systems like a tool for marketing automation, merchants usually overlook a key module, the data. The majority of service providers claim that data migration is very easy however it’s not the case.
You might gave managed a lot of data migrations, large or small. In this article, a checklist of Magento data migration services is given which is safe, accurate, and efficient. Indeed, data loss is the key risk. Nevertheless, there are many data concerns to take note of.
Preparation
You Need to Back Up the Data
Before you start the migration, you should back up the data. Ensure that you can access the backup anytime in the future. You should also date stamp the system periodically in order that you can reference the data easily if case anything goes wrong. It’s a good practice even though you are using any Magento migration service.
You Should Create a Team
Before doing migration, assign the roles to team members about who will handle which data and which fields they use. Outlining the roles of team members as well as data use of everyone can clarify decisions and responsibilities.
Developing a Data Migration Plan
Once the data is copied safely, you can document the Magento 2 Migration services plans. Start recognizing the data that you are migrating as well as where it exists. You can work out all your dependencies and hierarchies. You might decide to fetch only limited data.
Data Auditing
Despite what you migrate, make the data auditing in advance as it’s a very good time to clean up. You should look for these items:
Duplications and remove duplicates
Data comprehensiveness as incomplete data could be useless
Out-dated records might be a bounced email id or a former name
Developers usually test the system using hypothetical records as well as remove them prior to migration.
Recognize what tables and fields you are migrating. Through data audit, it is easy to learn that, for example, 400 fields are available in the database, however only 20-30 are occupied. A rapid test is to test the percentage of particular fields which contain data.
Despite what you migrate, audit the data early
Another way of narrowing down the data is speaking with the team members of identifying the use cases of data. For instance, customer service employees might not care about complete lifetime value of the customer, however the sales staff might. Assigning the main fields for every team member may help you determine the usage. Keep in mind that some fields might be associated with several data tables. Therefore, assembling the data map of fields, records, and tables can be affected.
The data terminology may prove to be confusing at times. Records are included of fields, all of which have one item for information. One set of records creates a table. For instance, a customer table could contain records which consist of three fields, one name field, one address field as well as one field for phone number.
After you back up the data, create the migration plan, perform an audit, as well as identify the files and fields, you need to identify which records to migrate as well as which to have only in the back up file. Think about creating the field which designates in case the record is traveling, or not. Every business is not the same. Which records will add value to a new platform as well as which simply messes it?
Now, you are ready for the data migration.
Migration
You Can Make a Data Map
While you do data migration, you need to make a map of the older data to the new location. You need to observe the fields as well as their formatting. For instance, date fields might not migrate appropriately if the older platform has used YYYY-MM-DD as well as the new system includes DD/MM/YYYY.
You Should Check for the Dependencies
In case, there is a data dependency, you need to ensure that the lookup needs to get established before you load the data.
You Need to Verify
Before making live it on a new platform, you need to verify that migration gets successful. Also, double-check the data.
You need to ensure that all the records are flagged for the migration and they got migrated.
You need to confirm that total records on a new platform are correct. You can search for some records to ensure they are available in the new systems.
You need to make sure that all the fields in new platforms are given in a good format. To do that, download one sample having 20 records and all the fields compared to the original data.
In conclusion, ensure that all the dependencies are there.
Post Migration
You need to train the users. As you successfully migrate, train all the users on suitable data use. Just keep in mind that four Cs for the healthy data, current, correct, complete, and consistent.