Never tried the differential approach.
But, you should be able to copy the data between two MySQL instances using just mysqldump and the mysql client by piping the output of the former into the latter. This way it will use the native protocol over the wire and should be quicker than writing to a file, moving/copying it across the network and re-importing it.
If you configure both connections using mysql_config_editor you won't even need all the command line arguments, just enough to tell mysqldump and mysql client which connections to use from the config:
Code:
mysqldump --login-path=local database| mysql --login-path=remote
The new server will have to allow connections from remote IP which it doesn't by default (it listens on 127.0.0.1, but you can make it listen on 0.0.0.0 for all connections) |