the copy and paste is not as straighforward as it seems. After a lot of crashes, I found that I can only copy and paste around 40 entries. Anything more will trigger "out of memory" error in PVD and crash the software. Before the crash, I noted less than 500mb of memory usage. I guess this is the limit of the copy and paste memory usage for PVD.
So now, with the help of Ditto clipboard tool, I am trying to copy the thing over faster.