I have a database in SQL Server Express 2012 with data in it that I care very little about. I decided to move to whatever the newest version of SQL Server Express is (2017? 2019? I forget which). I have two options, one is to abandon the data in the existing database because I care very little about it. However, there is some slight advantage to moving the data over to the new DB. Oddly, upgrading SQL Server directly didn't seem to work. I got a failure at some point along the process, and ended up just installing the new one beside the old one. I didn't spend much time exploring this, because my real goal was to migrate the whole DB onto a new computer, so on the new computer I simply installed the newer version of SQL Server, and not the old one. Whether I migrate on the old computer really doesn't matter.

So, the situation is that I have two computers. One has SQL Server Express 2012 along with the latest version. The other computer just has the latest version. I'm looking for the easiest way to move the data from a database on the 2012 to a database on the newer version. It seems like there should be an easy way to do this, but from searching around online, every solution seems so convoluted that I'd be better off just abandoning the old data and starting over. As I said, I don't really care about it all that much. In fact, the database will be replicated into the new version of SQL Server, because that is an automated process that I want to test, and now have two good test cases to work with. So, I'm really looking to migrate data, or a whole database (I have a test case for that, too).

What's the easiest way to migrate data from one version to the other, given the same DB structure on both? Second, what's the easiest way to migrate an entire DB from one version to another?