How do I move off my CRM without losing data?

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Export everything before you commit to anything, confirm you can actually read the export, and run both systems in parallel until the new one is proven. The records people forget are the ones that matter in a dispute: notes, attachments, email history, and timestamps. Standard exports usually cover contacts and deals and quietly omit activity history. Check specifically for that before signing with the new vendor, because it is often the hardest part to reconstruct. Notes, call logs, email threads, attachments, and the timestamps on all of them are the institutional memory of every relationship — and in a dispute, the record of who said what and when is the record that matters. Some platforms only surface full history through their API rather than the export button; find out which kind you are dealing with while you still have leverage, not after you have given notice. The technical heart of a migration is preserving relationships between records. A CRM is not tables of contacts and deals; it is the links between them — this note belongs to this deal, which belongs to this company, which has these three contacts. Exports flatten those links into internal IDs, and the import has to rebuild them by carrying the old ID on every record as a reference field. Migrations done as disconnected imports produce a database where the contacts all exist and none of the history is attached to anything — technically complete, practically useless. Expect the field-mapping pass to double as a data-cleaning project. The old CRM's picklists will not match the new one's, half the pipeline stages have no equivalent, freetext lives where the new system wants structure, and years of duplicates are waiting to be carried across faithfully. Decide per field: map, transform, or archive. Two lossy details deserve explicit checks, because defaults eat them silently: record ownership (everything imported as the admin user destroys accountability) and dates (imports that stamp every record 'created today' destroy the timeline). Migrate in stages and keep a read-only copy of the old system for a year. The cost of that is trivial next to discovering a gap after the account is closed. Run the two systems in parallel for a bounded window with explicit cutover criteria — record counts reconciled, spot-checks on real accounts passing, the team completing daily work in the new system without reaching for the old one. Then freeze the old system read-only rather than keeping it half-alive; a parallel run without an end date becomes two half-trusted CRMs, which is worse than either alone. Plan the people half with the same seriousness. The team's muscle memory lives in the old tool, and the first two weeks in the new one are when data quality either establishes itself or collapses — which is an argument for migrating one team fully rather than everyone at once, and for having someone own the migration end to end. A CRM migration is a data-engineering project wearing a software subscription's clothing; teams that treat it as 'switching apps' are the ones who discover the gap a year later.