Can I roll back a clone to restore changes in update sets?

[sbh]

I just cloned from production to our dev instance and lost the contents of three completed update sets, even though I excluded the sys_update_set table and created a data preserver for it. I had planned to move those update sets to production before requesting the clone but I forgot. Can I restore their contents by rolling back the clone? Thanks in advance for any help with this.

[Pradeep Sharma]

Hello Sbh,

Please refer https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/newyork-platform-administration/page/administer/managing-data/tas...

- Pradeep Sharma

[Tejas Tamboli · Accepted solution]

Hello Sbh,

Refer below link to rollback update set-

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/newyork-platform-administration/page/administer/managing-data/tas...

You can backout the update set to revert the changes that has been captured in the update set.

First step is to go to local update set and open the update set and click on Back-Out

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/kingston-application-development/page/build/system-update-sets/ta...

hope this will help you.

Mark ✅ Correct if this solves your issue and also mark 👍 Helpful if you find my response useful to you and help others to find information faster.

Thanks,

Tejas

[sbh]

Thank you both for your prompt and helpful answers. Both answers were correct; rolling back the clone did restore the changes to the update sets. I also asked this question in HI (Pradeep and Tejas responded more quickly) and am still working with them to find out whether the data was not preserved because I set up the exclude-table and data preserver for sys_update_set incorrectly, or whether those don't work for update sets the same way they do for other tables. But I did get this helpful explanation:

"By default a table and all its data is copied from source to target (and in the process you replace/lose the target data). If you set a preserver for a table, the source data is copied and the records from the target are added to that table as well. If an exclude is set for a table you will end up with an empty table with neither source nor target data. If you add both a preserver [I think he meant excluder here] (removing all source data) AND a preserver you end up with a table with the target data only."

[sbh]

Just heard back from HI. They don't advise preserving update sets.

To get it to work you would also need to preserve the Customer Updates [sys_update_xml] table. This table is considered bulk log data, the clone engine however is only designed to preserve configuration records.

In case you want to retain some update sets you want to close them and export them to XML using the related link on the update set form. Please see KB0733704 - Save an update set as a local XML file on this topic.