Techniques for managing the migration of data from one virtual machine to another using volume snapshotting and sub-file cloning are described. According to exemplary embodiments, data including a header and content is stored on a storage volume associated with a first virtual machine. The header is converted to be compatible with a second virtual machine, and the storage volume is snapshotted to provide a read-only representation of the storage volume at the time that the snapshot was created. New data is created using the converted header and a pointer to the location of the data inside the volume snapshot. Using the exemplary techniques described herein, data can be migrated from one virtual machine to another in constant time, and data access is more robust because the pointer refers to the volume snapshot.