How long will it take to migrate my data?
Predicting the exact time it will take to migrate your data is quite difficult. That's because there are many factors that influence the speed of migration.
The procedure of migrating data between help desks boils down to two steps: reading and writing. The Migration Wizard first retrieves (reads) all records you told it to migrate from the source help desk. And then moves them over (writes) to the target help desk.
The time it will take to complete each step depends on the following factors:
- The total number of records you’re migrating.
- The number and size of attachments.
- API limits of the source and target help desk.
- Specifications of the API.
- Your target help desk.
Here’s what each of the above has to do with your migration.
1. Records
The more records you have in your source, the longer it might take to migrate them. However, if you have high API limits, then this shouldn’t be much of an issue.
2. Attachments
The more and larger the attachments, the longer it will take to retrieve them. Unfortunately, there is no way to find out how many attachments there is in the source help desk to estimate how much time it will take to migrate them.
3. API limits and specifications
An API limit is the number of requests that can be done within a certain time frame. For instance, the Essential plan on Zendesk allows 10 requests per minute. Each help desk platform allows different API limits and usually they depend on your pricing plan.
Also, the way that the API is built plays a huge role. Some platforms allow fetching a ticket with all comments using just one API request. Other platforms, however, need to send separate requests to fetch each record. That means one call to fetch a ticket, another call to fetch its comment and so on.
To help you understand this better, let’s investigate the case for Zendesk to Freshdesk Migration. We will briefly break down how each API works and the number of calls used to migrate data.
| Reading data | Writing data | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Zendesk entities | API calls used | Freshdesk entities | API calls used |
| Groups | Count - 1 call Fetch - 1 call per 100 groups | Groups | Search - 1 call per 100 groups Create - 1 call per group |
| Staff | Count - 1 call Fetch - 1 call per 100 staff members + 1 call to get relations for each staff. | Staff | Search - 1 call per 100 staff members Create - 1 request to check if there’s a contact with the same email as the agent has. If there isn’t, then 1 request to create a contact + 1 request to update is as agent |
| Companies | Count - 1 call Fetch - 1 call per 100 companies | Companies | Search - 1 call per 100 companies Create - 1 call per company |
| Contacts | Count - 1 call Fetch 1 call per 100 contacts | Contacts | Search - 1 request per 100 contacts. If the same Zendesk contact is found on Freshdesk then +1 call to assign it to a company. If not, then we create a contact. Create - 1 request per contact |
| Tickets | Count - 1 call Fetch - 1 call per 100 tickets + 1 call for each ticket to assign the relations | Tickets | Create - 1 call per ticket + 1 call per reply |
| Knowledge base articles | Count - 1 call Fetch - 1 call per 100 articles + additional requests to retrieve attachments | Knowledge base articles | Create - 1 call per article |
| Categories | Count - 1 call Fetch - 1 call per 100 category | Categories | Search - 1 call per 100 categories Create - 1 call per category |
| Folders | Count - 1 call Fetch - 1 call per 100 folder | Folders | Search - 1 call per 100 folders Create - 1 call per folder |
| Count - getting the total amount of records | Search - means that Migration Wizard checks records for duplicates before creating new ones. Only true if you already have records in the target help desk. | ||
| Fetch - retrieving records. | Create - creating a record in the target help desk. | ||
4. Your target help desk
If you’re migrating to a clean target help desk, then it will take less time. If you already have some tickets, contacts, etc. in your target help desk, the Migration Wizard will take its time to double-check them to avoid duplicates.
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What you can do
First things first, you can reach out to the company you're switching to and ask to temporarily increase the API limits for your account. This way you will speed up the migration. Make sure to tackle this before the migration.
Second, you can try to calculate how long it will take to migrate your data. To do so, you need to know the API limits on your source and target help desk.
Hopefully, this article answered your question. If not, feel free to contact us.