A disclosed method includes distinguishing static and dynamic persistent data, copying the static persistent data at the source data store to the destination data store on a basis of frequencies of updates, copying the dynamic persistent data to the destination data store, updating a bitmap data structure during the copying of the dynamic persistent data to indicate which blocks of the dynamic persistent data have been modified during the copying step, identifying the blocks that have been modified during the copying step using the bitmap data structure, and iteratively copying the identified blocks to the destination data store. The method may further include determining when the number of the identified blocks is below a predetermined threshold and suspending the virtual machine prior to the next copying step.