Does cloning delete update sets in the target instance?

[johnnyw]

When we implemented ServiceNow 2 months ago, we did all our development work in our DEV instance and then cloned the DEV instance to Production.   The marjority of the work was captured in update sets in DEV.  

Fast Forward to this week...   SN applied a quarterly patch (Q4-2016 Fuji Patch 7 Hot Fix 5) on our production instance.   This patch reverted many things we modified back to out-of-the box. We logged a HI incident and they confirmed that the patch updated all of these because there was no record of change in the sys_update_xml table.   The same patch was applied to our DEV instance a few weeks ago without any issues.

Luckily we still have a DEV instance that is still configured pretty close to production and can re-migrate all of the update sets back to production.   However, I would still like to understand what happened.   Since we cloned DEV to Prod, shouldn't this table and all update sets from DEV be copied to Prod as well?   Should cloning delete the update sets from the target instance?

Regards,

Johnny

Fuji Patch 7 Hot Fix 5

Reg

Re

[Community Alums]

Effectively, yes. The clone will overwrite the update sets on the target instance. You will end up with the same update sets you applied to your prod instance in state of 'Completed'. At least, this has been my experience.

If you have any update sets incomplete, or you want to keep, you'll need to back them up or move them over to prod before the clone. This might answer in more detail:

Re: System Clone

Cheers,

Tim

[johnnyw]

Based on your response, I want to make sure that it is clear as to what happened.   We did not have any update sets in the target, to overwrite.   We are just missing the ones that should have came from the source instance.

PROD (target) was a totally clean instance.   Nothing was done there so no update sets existed there.

DEV (source) was our instance that we did all development work in and all update sets exist here only.

When we did the production cutover - they (the consultants) cloned DEV to PROD so that everything should have been copied over including the update sets that were in DEV.   However, it looks like sys_update_xml table in PROD now does not have the update sets that should have been cloned over from DEV.   We did not check this table or the update sets before the patch was applied, so cannot confirm if it existed prior to the patch.

[Uncle Rob]

Unfortunately someone gave you some terrible advice.   Cloning Dev over Prod is a horrible practice.   Moving your update sets from Dev to Prod is going to be problematic because those update sets now exist on prod the same way they do on Dev.   Meaning, Prod thinks it has update sets that are open, not committed.

It *is* interesting that the patch demonstrated different behaviors in Dev rather than Prod.   I'd push back on support about that.

[Mike Allen]

Check to see if someone added these to the Excluded tables module.   They can be found here: