Six Common Data Migration Failures and How Early Checks Can Prevent Them

A technical breakdown identifies six recurring failures in data migration projects, including duplicate records, missing rows, orphaned documents, silent load rejections, date format errors, and unmanaged cutover activity. Each failure has a low-cost early detection method, such as row count comparisons, null-join checks, and date format verification against known values. The analysis warns that late discovery of these issues — often post-go-live or during audits — becomes significantly more costly and harder to remediate. A particular concern is silent data loss, where a migration reports success but thousands of records are simply absent, with no source system left to recover from. The piece also flags non-technical risks like scope creep and unanswered sign-off requests being mistaken for approval.