Every HubSpot migration guide talks about what you can move: contacts, companies, deals, tickets, notes. What most guides skip is the long list of things you cannot move, or that fundamentally change when you transfer them.
This is the honest guide. We have helped teams migrate between HubSpot portals hundreds of times, and the biggest source of frustration is never the technical process itself. It is the moment, two weeks after go-live, when a sales rep asks where their activity timeline went, or when a marketing manager realises their email engagement data is gone.
If you know what you are going to lose before you start, you can prepare. You can export, document, and set expectations. What blindsides teams is discovering these gaps after the old portal is already decommissioned.
| Data Type | Transfers? | Fidelity | Workaround |
|---|---|---|---|
| Contact/Company Properties | Yes | Full | Direct CSV or API import |
| Deal Records & Amounts | Yes | Full | Direct CSV or API import |
| Activity Timeline | No | Lost | API as flat notes |
| Original Timestamps | Partial | Overwritten | Custom "Original Date" property |
| Note Formatting & Attribution | Partial | Degraded | Plain text export |
| Workflow Enrollment History | No | Lost | Custom completion properties |
| Email Engagement Data | No | Lost | Export reports pre-migration |
| Form Submission Attribution | No | Lost | Export attribution reports |
| Deal Stage History | No | Lost | Custom text property summary |
| Calculated Properties | Partial | Recalculated | Verify input data integrity |
Activity Timeline Gaps
The activity timeline on a contact, company, or deal record is the single most valuable piece of context in your CRM. It tells the story of every interaction: emails sent, calls logged, meetings booked, page views, form submissions, and internal notes.
Here is what happens to it during migration.
What Transfers
Contact property data transfers cleanly. Names, emails, phone numbers, custom properties, lifecycle stages, and lead statuses all come across. Deal amounts, close dates, and pipeline stages can be mapped and transferred.
What Does Not Transfer
The activity timeline itself does not migrate as a connected, interactive history. You can export activities and import them as notes or custom timeline events, but the result is a flat, static record.
- Clickable email records with full thread
- Embedded call recordings with player
- Meeting links tied to scheduling page
- Interactive page view timeline
- Conversation threads from inbox
- Static text note: "Email sent on 2025-06-15"
- Plain text: "Call logged, 12 min"
- Text reference: "Meeting on 2025-06-20"
- No page view data
- No conversation history
What you end up with, at best, is a text note that says “Email sent on 2025-06-15: Subject: Follow-up on pricing” rather than a rich, interactive record you can click into and review.
For teams that rely on activity context for sales handoffs or customer success reviews, this is a significant loss. Running a thorough portal audit before migration helps you identify which activity data is most critical and plan your archiving strategy.
Sales teams lose the ability to review full email threads, listen to call recordings, and see website engagement history for their accounts. Plan for a productivity dip in the first 2-4 weeks as reps adjust to working without historical context.
Original Timestamps Are Replaced
This one catches almost every migration team off guard.
When you import records into a new HubSpot portal, the “Create Date” property is set to the import date, not the original creation date. A contact who entered your CRM in 2022 will show a create date of 2026 in the new portal unless you take specific steps to preserve the original timestamp.
The Vanishing Pipeline History
A SaaS company migrated 15,000 deals to their new portal. Because deal create dates were overwritten, their "Days to Close" calculated property showed every deal closing in 0 days. Pipeline velocity reports became useless, and the sales forecasting model based on historical conversion rates had to be rebuilt from scratch.
How to Preserve Timestamps
The workaround is to create a custom property (something like “Original Create Date”) and populate it with the true creation date before import. HubSpot does allow you to set the “Create Date” during import if you map it explicitly, but this only works for the primary create date. Other system timestamps like “Last Modified Date” and “Last Activity Date” will be overwritten by the import process regardless.
Create custom date properties like "Original Create Date," "Original Last Modified," and "Original Last Activity" and populate them before migration. This preserves your historical data in a queryable format.
Why This Matters
Timestamp accuracy affects:
| System | Impact of Incorrect Timestamps |
|---|---|
| Lead scoring models | Time-based criteria produce wrong scores |
| Reporting | Lead velocity, time-to-close, and aging reports are inaccurate |
| Workflow enrollment | Date-based triggers fire incorrectly |
| SLA calculations | Service Hub SLAs reference wrong dates |
| Forecasting | Pipeline aging and conversion rate models break |
If your organisation runs reports on when leads were created, how long deals stay in pipeline stages, or customer tenure, you need a timestamp preservation strategy before you begin.
Internal Notes and Logged Activities
Notes attached to contact, company, and deal records can technically be migrated. But “technically possible” and “practically useful” are different things.
The Problem with Note Migration
When you export notes from HubSpot, you get the note body text, the associated record, and the creation date. What you lose is:
- ✗The user attribution (which team member wrote the note)
- ✗The visual formatting (bold, italic, bullet lists)
- ✗Embedded mentions (@mentions of team members)
- ✗Attached files and images
- ✗The note's position in the chronological timeline relative to other activities
Imported notes show up attributed to whatever user or integration performed the import. A carefully documented sales conversation between a rep and their manager now looks like it was written by “Import API” on the day of migration.
Lost Author Context
A customer success team relied on internal notes to track escalation history. After migration, every note appeared as if written by the migration admin on the same date. The team could no longer tell who documented each issue or when it was originally logged, undermining their entire escalation tracking process.
Logged Calls, Emails, and Meetings
Logged activities follow the same pattern. You can export the raw data, but the rich metadata is lost. A logged call loses its recording, duration tracking, and outcome categorisation. A logged email loses its thread context and attachment references.
For teams consolidating portals after a merger, as described in our portal consolidation guide, this is especially painful because you are merging two histories into one, and both lose fidelity in the process.
Workflow Enrollment History
Your workflow enrollment history tells you which contacts went through which automations, when they entered, and what actions were taken on them. This data is invaluable for debugging, compliance, and understanding your automation’s actual impact.
What You Lose
When you migrate to a new portal, workflow enrollment history does not come with you. Even if you recreate identical workflows in the destination portal, the new workflows have no memory of past enrollments.
| Capability | Source Portal | After Migration |
|---|---|---|
| View which contacts received a nurture sequence | Available | Lost |
| Audit trail for GDPR consent workflows | Available | Lost |
| Re-enrollment suppression | Active | Reset |
| Workflow performance metrics | Historical | Starts at zero |
| Enrollment count and conversion rate | Accumulated | Starts at zero |
Without enrollment history, contacts may re-enter automations they have already completed. This means customers could receive duplicate onboarding sequences, welcome campaigns, or promotional offers they have already acted on.
How to Mitigate
Before migration, export workflow enrollment logs for your most critical automations. Store these as CSV files or import them as custom properties on contact records. For example, you could create a property called “Completed Onboarding Workflow” set to “Yes” for every contact who finished that automation in the source portal.
This is manual and imperfect, but it prevents the most damaging consequence: contacts being re-enrolled in automations they have already received. Our workflow migration checklist covers this process in detail.
Email Engagement Data
Marketing email engagement data is one of the biggest losses in any HubSpot migration, and it affects both reporting and operational functionality.
What Disappears
- ✗Open and click history for every email sent from the source portal
- ✗Email health metrics (bounce rates, spam complaint rates, unsubscribe rates)
- ✗A/B test results and winning variant data
- ✗Send frequency data that HubSpot uses to optimise delivery timing
- ✗Contact-level engagement scoring that factors into lead scoring models
The Operational Impact
HubSpot uses email engagement data internally to make decisions about deliverability. Contacts who consistently open emails are treated differently than contacts who never engage. When you migrate to a new portal, HubSpot has no engagement history to work with. Every contact starts with a blank slate.
- Engagement-based segments carry over
- Lead scoring reflects historical behavior
- Deliverability reputation is intact
- Send-time optimization works immediately
- All engagement segments are empty
- Lead scores reset to zero
- Sender reputation starts fresh
- Send-time optimization has no data
This means your carefully segmented lists based on engagement (like “Opened email in last 90 days”) will be empty in the new portal. Any workflows or lead scoring rules that reference email engagement will need to be rebuilt from the ground up, and they will not have useful data until enough time has passed in the new portal.
For a deeper look at the email-specific aspects of migration, see our guide on transferring email templates and sequences.
Form Submission Attribution
Form submissions are a cornerstone of HubSpot’s marketing attribution model. Every form submission records not just the data entered, but the page it was submitted on, the traffic source, the campaign, and the original/latest source properties it influenced.
What Transfers vs. What Is Lost
You can migrate form submission data as contact property values. If someone filled out a “Request a Demo” form with their company name, that property value transfers.
| Form Data Element | Transfers? | Impact If Lost |
|---|---|---|
| Submitted field values (as properties) | Yes | Low |
| Submission event on timeline | No | Medium |
| Campaign/traffic source attribution | No | High |
| Form analytics (conversion rate per page) | No | High |
| Submission timestamps in analytics | No | Medium |
| Progressive profiling history | No | Low |
Impact on Reporting
If your marketing team relies on multi-touch attribution reports, be aware that migration effectively resets your attribution model. Historical form submissions will not appear in the new portal’s attribution reports, which means any report spanning pre- and post-migration periods will show incomplete data.
The practical solution is to export your attribution reports from the source portal and maintain them as historical reference documents alongside the new portal’s data.
Multi-touch attribution reports will show a hard break at the migration date. Export all attribution data before migration and plan for a transition period where both source exports and new portal data are referenced.
Deal Stage History
Deal stage history tracks every time a deal moved between pipeline stages, including the date, the user who moved it, and the time spent in each stage. This is critical for sales pipeline analysis and forecasting.
What Migrates
You can migrate deals with their current stage and amount. The deal record itself transfers cleanly.
What Is Lost
The complete stage progression history is gone. In the new portal, every migrated deal will show a single stage entry on the date of import.
- ✗Time-in-stage calculations for historical deals
- ✗Stage skip detection (deals that jumped from "Discovery" to "Closed Won")
- ✗Sales velocity metrics based on historical stage movement
- ✗Forecasting model inputs that rely on historical conversion rates between stages
Broken Sales Forecasting
A B2B company relied on stage-to-stage conversion rates to forecast quarterly revenue. After migration, all historical stage movement data was lost. Their forecasting model showed 100% conversion at every stage because every deal had only one stage entry — the import date. It took three months of new data accumulation before forecasting was reliable again.
Workaround
For open deals that are actively being worked, create a custom property like “Previous Stage History” and populate it with a text summary before migration. For closed historical deals, the stage history is primarily a reporting concern, so export your pipeline reports before decommissioning the source portal.
Calculated Property Resets
HubSpot offers calculated properties that automatically compute values based on other property data: rollup calculations, averages, sums, min/max values, and time-between calculations.
What Happens During Migration
Calculated properties are system-generated. You cannot import values into them. When you migrate records to a new portal:
| Scenario | Outcome |
|---|---|
| Calculated property with current data inputs | Recalculates correctly (if inputs migrated) |
| Calculated property depending on historical data | Produces incorrect results |
| ”Count of” properties (form submissions, etc.) | Resets to zero |
| ”Time between” properties | Recalculates using import timestamps |
Example
A property called “Days to Close” that calculates the time between deal creation and close date will show wildly incorrect values if the deal’s create date was overwritten during import. A deal that actually took 45 days to close might show 0 days if both the create date and close date landed on the same import date.
Before migration, snapshot calculated property values into standard number or text properties. This preserves the historical computed values even after the underlying calculation data is disrupted.
What You Can Do About It
This guide is not meant to discourage you from migrating. It is meant to ensure you go in with realistic expectations and a solid preparation plan.
Pre-Migration Data Archive
Before you decommission the source portal, export everything that will not survive the migration:
Activity Timeline Data
Export activity data for key accounts and open deals. Store as structured CSV files for team reference.
Workflow Enrollment Logs
Export enrollment logs for critical automations. Create custom completion properties on contact records.
Email Performance Reports
Export campaign performance data, A/B test results, and engagement metrics for historical reference.
Form Analytics & Attribution
Export form conversion rates, submission data, and multi-touch attribution reports.
Pipeline Velocity Reports
Export stage history reports, conversion rates, and sales velocity metrics.
Compliance Audit Trail
Export full audit trails for GDPR consent workflows, data processing records, and regulatory documentation.
Store these exports somewhere accessible, like a shared drive or your project management tool, because your team will reference them for months after migration.
Set Team Expectations
The single most important thing you can do is communicate these limitations to your team before migration day. Sales reps need to know their activity timelines will look different. Marketing needs to understand that email engagement data resets. Customer success needs to plan for the loss of historical context.
A pre-migration portal audit helps quantify exactly what is at stake and gives every team a clear picture of what changes.
Use Custom Properties as a Safety Net
For the most critical historical data points, create custom properties in the destination portal to hold values that would otherwise be lost:
- ✓Original create date
- ✓Historical lifecycle stage progression
- ✓Key workflow completions
- ✓Lead source from the source portal
- ✓Total email engagement score (exported as a snapshot)
These properties preserve the data in a queryable format, even if the interactive timeline context is gone.
Plan Your Reporting Transition
Accept that you will have a reporting gap. Historical reports will live in exported files from the source portal, and new reporting starts fresh in the destination portal. Plan a transition period where both are referenced, and set a clear date after which only the new portal’s data is considered the source of truth.
Data loss during HubSpot migration is not a question of "if" but "how much." The teams that succeed are the ones who quantify the losses upfront, archive what matters, and set clear expectations with every stakeholder before the migration begins.
If your migration is complex enough to involve significant data loss concerns, Jetstack’s audit and migration services can help you identify, quantify, and mitigate these risks before you start.
FAQ
Can I migrate HubSpot activity timelines to a new portal?
Not in their native, interactive format. You can export activity data and import it as notes or custom timeline events, but you lose the rich interactive elements like clickable email records, call recordings, and page view tracking. The imported data will be a static text representation of the original activity.
Will my HubSpot lead scoring reset after migration?
Yes. Lead scoring models transfer as property configurations, but the accumulated scores based on email engagement, page views, and form submissions reset because the underlying activity data does not migrate. Contacts will need to re-accumulate engagement signals in the new portal before scores become meaningful.
How do I preserve deal stage history during migration?
Export your pipeline stage history reports from the source portal before migration. For open deals, consider creating a custom text property that captures the stage progression (e.g., “Discovery > Demo > Proposal > Negotiation”) so sales reps have context in the new portal. The automated stage movement tracking will start fresh.
Does HubSpot offer any native tools to prevent data loss during migration?
HubSpot’s import tools handle property data well, but they are not designed to transfer activity history, engagement data, or system-generated metadata. The platform’s export tools let you pull most data as CSVs, but reimporting that data in a meaningful way requires significant planning and custom property creation.
What is the most commonly overlooked data loss in HubSpot migration?
Email engagement data and workflow enrollment history are the two most commonly overlooked losses. Teams plan carefully for contact and deal data but forget that their engagement-based segments, lead scoring, and re-enrollment suppression all depend on historical data that does not transfer. These gaps only become apparent weeks after migration when reports look wrong and contacts start receiving duplicate automations.
How long should I keep the old portal active after migration?
We recommend keeping the source portal accessible (even in read-only mode) for at least 90 days after migration. This gives your team time to reference historical data, verify that everything critical was exported, and answer questions that come up during the transition. Some organisations keep the source portal for 6-12 months if compliance requirements demand it.