Data migration
, "nearly 40 percent of data migration projects were over time, over budget, or failed entirely." As such, to achieve an effective data migration, proper planning is critical. While the specifics of a data migration plan may vary—sometimes significantly—from project to project, the computing company IBM suggests there are three main phases to most any data migration project: planning, migration, and post-migration. Each of those phases has its own steps. During planning, dependencies and requirements are analyzed, migration scenarios get developed and tested, and a project plan that incorporates the prior information is created. During the migration phase, the plan is enacted, and during post-migration, the completeness and thoroughness of the migration is validated, documented, closed out, including any necessary decommissioning of legacy systems. For applications of moderate to high complexity, these data migration phases may be repeated several times before the new system is considered to be fully validated and deployed.
Data conversion
The objective of data conversion is to maintain all of the data, and as much of the embedded information as possible. This can only be done if the target format supports the same features and data structures present in the source file. Conversion of a word processing document to a plain text file necessarily involves loss of formatting information, because plain text format does not support word processing constructs such as marking a word as boldface. For this reason, conversion from one format to another which does not support a feature which is important to the user is rarely carried out, though it may be necessary for interoperability, e.g. converting a file from one version of Microsoft Word to an earlier version to enable transfer and use by other users who do not have the same later version of Word installed on their computer.