A method, system and program are disclosed for increasing the data transfer rates and efficiencies of processes used for migrating digital data from one long-term storage media to a second long-term storage media. A flat-file can be created and used as a work-list to read the data from the first long-term storage media. The data can then be transferred by data streaming to a workspace on a disk cache associated with the second long-term storage media. Logical units of the data in the workspace can be converted into a BLOB format and stored on a server associated with the second long-term storage media. A second flat-file can be created and used as an update reference for a database associated with the first long-term storage media. Using the second flat-file as a reference, a mass update of the database associated with the first long-term storage media can be performed to modify the database pointers so that they point to the locations of the BLOB data in the server associated with the second long-term storage media. After the data transfer from the first long-term storage media to the second long-term storage media is completed, the transferred data can be validated and the first long-term storage media retired.