Cloning and upgrading considerations for Developer Sandboxes

You should understand how plugins and sandboxes work before you clone or upgrade an instance with Developer Sandboxes. Always back up your work in a sandbox before any clone or upgrade, either by exporting the update sets or committing to source control.

Warning:

Because sandboxes are retired automatically after an upgrade or clone, ensure any work that you want to keep is preserved before upgrading. You must manually recreate sandboxes after an upgrade or clone.

• For Zurich Patch 5 or later, uncommitted work in existing sandboxes is automatically exported as remote update sets on the base instance, which you must commit to sandboxes created after the upgrade.
• For clones, you must manually save and restore all work in sandboxes.
• Any custom table configuration changes or fixes must be reapplied after an upgrade. Contact Now Support to open a case.

Upgrading instances with Developer Sandboxes

Family, patch, and security upgrades retire all existing sandboxes from an instance. After an upgrade, you can immediately begin creating sandboxes without contacting Support.

As of Zurich Patch 5, Developer Sandboxes will back up any update sets from the sandboxes and export them to the main instance. The following rules apply:

• The update set must contain at least one change since the sandbox was created for it to be backed up.
• Incomplete update sets are backed up as long as there's at least one change.
• If you install Developer Sandboxes on an instance after Zurich Patch 5, update sets are automatically backed up.
• If you install Developer Sandboxes on an instance before Zurich Patch 5, you must add the export_state column to the sys_dsb table:

  <element name="export_state" label="Export State" type="choice" default="not_exported">
      <choice>
         <element label="Not Exported" sequence="-1" value="not_exported"/>
         <element label="Requested" sequence="0" value="requested"/>
         <element label="Scheduled" sequence="1" value="scheduled"/>
         <element label="In Progress" sequence="2" value="in_progress"/>
         <element label="Completed" sequence="3" value="completed"/>
      </choice>
  </element>

Cloning instances with Developer Sandboxes

When you clone an instance, the sandboxes on the target instance are deleted and thus not available. You must open a support case to re-enable sandboxes after a clone.

Note:

You must always save your work in a sandbox before the clone.