What is the best practice for syncing up Dev to Prod?

[mikealderson]

I currently have a scheduled weekly job to clone our Production instance over our Test instance.   However, since our Development instance rarely doesn't have an Update Set "In Progress", it hasn't been synced up to Production in a while, and I fear the drift may eventually cause problems.   Is there a way to export the In Progress Update Sets, do a clone, and then reapply the Update Sets to Dev?   Is there a better way?

[Patrick Schult2 · Accepted solution]

Whenever I clone production down over dev I mark the update sets "Complete" so I can export them to XML. You basically just download all your update sets, run the clone, then reinstall the update sets.

When you upload an XML update set, it's loaded as a "Retrieved update set", that you need to preview, then install. After that, you can find it in your Local Update Sets, move it back to In Progress, and keep going.

[Goran WitchDoc]

Pretty much as Patrick says 😃

[mikealderson]

Do you actually move the update set back to "In Progress" or do you just create a second update set with the same name and add a 2 or some denotation that the sets go together when moved to prod?

[Patrick Schult2]

I just move the update sets back to in progress. There's no funny business with it - you can just move it from Complete > In Progress and keep working like normal.