Incremental migration
When you migrate to the target Exchange or Office 365 server using EdbMails Exchange migration tool, the first migration is a full migration, which migrates everything from the source to the target. After you complete the full migration with EdbMails, you can run the incremental migration, which migrates only the new items and the items which are not yet migrated by comparing the previous migration data.
EdbMails comes with the built-in support for incremental migration that is useful to migrate mail items without duplicating them on the target server on subsequent migration operations.
The incremental migration feature is useful in the following scenarios
- To migrate items that were excluded in the previous attempt (when you apply folder or filter options during the migration)
- To restore the edited or updated source items to the target folders such as calendars, appointments and notes.
After you migrate the mailboxes from a particular computer, you must migrate from the same source mailbox to the same target mailbox from the same computer to avoid duplicates on the target.
EdbMails Exchange migration tool with its incremental migration is one of the best solutions to run the migration without creating duplicates on your target server. This approach will save migration time, bandwidth and improve migration performance.
Following are the migration scenario you must ensure to avoid duplicate items in your target mailboxes
- Ensure that you are using EdbMails for the first time to migrate to the target mailbox. If the messages are already existing on the target (that were not migrated using EdbMails) then a re-migration may cause duplicate items.
- Ensure that you never select the same source and target mailbox. This will result in migration within the same mailbox and it will create duplicate items
- Ensure that you do not select the same mailbox during parallel migration on different computers. In addition, ensure that you migrate the mailboxes from the same computer during re-migration.
- Ensure that you always migrate your mailboxes using EdbMails. If you are using multiple migration methods such as Importing from PST, PowerShell and so on, it may result in duplicate items
Steps to perform Incremental migration from a different machine:
Copy and paste the meta-data folder 'C:\Program Files (x86)\EdbMails\MDATA_MGR' from the computer you used for migration to the new computer where you want to migrate. Set the 'Temp location for meta-data' accordingly as shown in the following screenshot.