Is it good to use migrations for old database in Codeigniter or Laravel

with databases say MySQl you can play with it , do a dump and import that dump via phpmyAdmin without even touching CodeIgniter. IN other words you could do all the
editing pruning and do a dump to a single file.

Import that dump and then just connect to that database .

Which database are you using ?

CMS CI4     I use Arch Linux by the way