Capturing Changes to Personal Developer Instance

DanAHtown
Tera Contributor

‎03-12-2025 01:10 PM

The purpose of this question is to find a practical, reliable, and appropriate method for isolating and saving changes to a personal developer instance (PDI), so that I can roll back the instance to a specific point in time if needed.

The main goal is to save time during recovery in case the instance becomes damaged due to a mistake I might make while using it for learning purposes.

From what I understand, cloning is not supported on PDIs. I have some familiarity with creating and using update sets, but I'm unsure whether they can be used to recover a new instance, especially as updates are applied during the PDI creation process. If update sets could meet my needs, I lack a clear understanding of how to identify the update sets that would be required to bring a new instance to the current state of my PDI. Additionally, I'm not sure if there are other processes I haven’t considered that might better support my goals.

Any information or suggestions you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

 

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Dr Atul G- LNG
Tera Patron
Tera Patron

‎03-12-2025 02:58 PM

Hi @DanAHtown 

 

 

  • Update Sets – One way to capture changes is through Update Sets. As soon as you get a fresh PDI, the first step should be to create an update set and start capturing all changes. The scope may vary depending on the project. A good practice is to always take a backup of all update sets before logging off for the day since you never know when the PDI might go offline.

  • Git Repository – Another method is using a Git repository. While I don’t have full knowledge of this, I believe it primarily works within scoped applications.

 

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DanAHtown
Tera Contributor

‎04-17-2025 04:46 AM

Do update sets and/or Git repository support making a 100% complete copy of an instance?

 

As a point of reference, it is possible to make a copy of every single file constituting a website and a complete copy, including system configuration files and files installed as the software used, plus complete copies of the databases used by the website. That copy can be copied to a different machine. running the same operating system. A complete, exact copy of the whole website can be loaded onto any machine running the same operating system,. creating a complete clone of the website that is 100% the same functionality and data, exactly the same as the machine it was copied from.

Can we do that for a ServiceNow instance using update sets?  A Git repository?

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