Ed Pollack opens an import-export business:
For the purposes of this article, we will focus solely on the task of moving a data set from one server to another. Topics such as ETL, ELT, data warehousing, data lakes, etc…are important and relevant to data movement, but out of scope for a focused discussion such as this.
Ed touches on why you might want to use files and then shares his recommendations for generating files from SQL Server data as well as importing data from flat files into SQL Server.