Cloning from PROD to DEV

sonita · ‎07-20-2018

How to clone from PROD instance to DEV instance?

Allen Andreas · ‎07-23-2018

You may have to contact HI for that information, it's set by ServiceNow and is done during non-peak hours across the board. So SN has a specific schedule they stick to for everyone, mostly.

I found out because I contacted HI back when I first started to get all the details.

See this for more info:

ServiceNow maintains seven daily and three weekly backups on disk. Daily backups are preserved for one week. Weekly backups are preserved for one month. The backup data never leaves the datacenter. Backups include data from the primary and mirrored datacenters of all customers instances, including production and sub-production instances.


ServiceNow generally does not schedule backups for specific instances because most instances share a database server with several other instances. The entire database server is backed up each night.


Restoring from backup, especially for production, is a last resort. There is always the potential for data loss because anything saved after the backup was taken is lost. Also, while the restoration process is running, the production instance is unavailable. For some customers, it can take many hours to restore causing an unacceptable amount of downtime.

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Matthew Glenn · ‎07-20-2018

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/jakarta-platform-administration/page/administer/managing-data/con...

sonita · ‎07-23-2018

Hi Matthew,

Do I need to get update from all the custom tables in DEV before cloning?

Allen Andreas · ‎07-23-2018

Hi Matthew,

So basically you'd want to go to System Clone > Request Clone, on Prod. You would then select your target instance (i.e. Dev) and insert admin credentials.

A few things to keep in mind:

1) This will completely overwrite your Dev environment (except for any exclusions you set up during the request clone process, i.e. exclude specific tables, preserve your Dev theme (meaning not overwrite it), etc.)

2) You are unable to schedule the clone any sooner than 4 hours out. Meaning you can't schedule it for the clone to happen right now. It's a minimum of 4 hours.

3) When cloning, it will take the LAST BACKUP of your source instance (so for you, Prod) and THAT will be what goes over to your target instance (Dev). So for me, and this may differ for others, but my Prod backs up everyday at 3:30PM ET. So if I scheduled this for 2:30...it's going to grab the backup from the previous day....and just miss todays...

4) You'll need to export any update sets your working on as the clone will overwrite all of that (to answer your question above).

Thanks!

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sonita · ‎07-23-2018

Thank you very helpful. I read somewhere that I need to create an admin user too. my question is , shall I login with user in order to perform the clone or it's only for authentication?