title: Transferring / Migrating an entire Catalog in Magento
body: <p>I've been trying to transfer the entire catalog from one Magento server to another and I've been experiencing some significant problems.</p>
  
  <p>I can get most of the catalog data across, but I always end up missing something like product swatches, product categories or a product's custom options. To get these across I then end up building my own scripts that queries Magento, writes the data to a CSV file of my own design, and then write another script that will add this data to the other server.</p>
  
  <p>Ive been asking the other developers in house, and apparently this is how they do every migration. They spend ages building lots of custom scripts just to transfer the catalog across, and apparently the different Magento sites are so different they have to build entirely new scripts when they transfer the next site.</p>
  
  <p>Is this a common experience for everybody?</p>
  
  <p>I feel like there must be a better way. Does anybody know of a better way to transfer the entire catalog (not just the products, but everything) to another server? Can we not just copy across the entire SQL Database?</p>