Cloning: "Preserve users and related tables" does not seem to work

[Hans Peter]

Hi,

I'll be doing a clone from prod to dev in a few days, and wanted to test the functionality. So today, I cloned our dev on one of our demo instances, and explicitly checked the "Preserve users and related tables"-Box on the clone profile. I didn't touch anything else, so the clone profile still references the default exclusions, preservers and cleanup scripts.

When the cloning process finished, I was unable to log into the demo instance (which was the clone target) with my user. I knew at this point that preserving the users had not worked, and I was able to use an admin account from the source system to log in and confirm: all users of the demo system had been deleted, and all users of the clone source system had been imported.

I thought "Preserve users and related table" would prevent exactly that from happening? The tooltip says that users and related tables will be preserved on the target instance, and excluded from the source instance, so the outcome I expected was that the users on my demo system wouldn't be touched at all - but clearly, that is not what happened.

Did I misunderstand the functionality of this checkbox, and if so, do I have to write exclusions and preservers myself to attain my goal of not touching the users/roles/groups in the clone target system?

Thanks in advance for your help,

Hans

[Ashutosh Munot1 · Accepted solution]

Hi,

I had the same issue and i raised a HI ticket and i got to know that it was atleast a bug. so if you click that button true or false it doesnot make sense. I got this when i upgraded from Orlando to Paris.

SO i added cloned preserve rules and exclude rules.

Thanks,
Ashutosh

[Hans Peter]

Okay, that's... pretty insane honestly.

I tried adding the tables to exclusions and preservers and then unchecked the "Preserve Users..." box. It had some weird effects... still trying to figure out what happened, but it looks like the exclusion did not work, but the preservation did.

Thanks for the answer though, at least I know I'm not crazy. I'll continue trying.

[green jason]

Have you had any ideas why the exclusion did not work? Currently, I'm facing this issue as well

[yt ccq]

ISSUE: "Preserve users and related tables" does not work

MOST PROBABLE CAUSE:
This button is currently disabled as of May 1, 2020. We sincerely apologize that the The clone functionality "Preserve users and related tables" currently does not work and is currently disabled for all clones

SOLUTION PROPOSED:
Please review KB0753118 on how to properly preserve & exclude user records.
https://support.servicenow.com/kb?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0753118