How to treat previewed update sets when cloning to the retrieved update set update source

[AlainT1]

Hi all,

We are in the process of moving from Service Manager to ServiceNow and last weekend was our first attempt at cloning our Production instance to our preproduction (PP) instance.

We have set up the proper exclude and preserve entries but we still encountered an issue with the retrieved update sets:

We move our update set from the lower instances to the higher one using the parent process.  That works great until it doesn't.  We never had an issue until we cloned from Prod to PP.  The issue was that when we recommitted the update set that were completed in Test (our path is Dev=>Test=>Preprod=>Prod) in PP and then retrieved the completed update set in Production, we ended up with duplicate Retrieved Update Sets (RUS) and the Parent/Child relation were all over the place.

To fix this, we deleted all the previewed and loaded RUS in PP and in Prod.  When then retrieved update sets from PP to Prod and from Test to PP. - It worked perfectly but it feels strange.

For future clone, we plan on deleted all the previewed and loaded RUS in Production and to exclude the sys_remote_update table.

Is this the right way to clone from Prod to Preprod? and is there a way to automate the cleanup of the RUS?

Thank you for reading this long and winded message.  I appreciate any help you can provide

Alain