[Music] hey everyone it's Justin thank you for watching and welcome to my house that's Justin's house in this video I want to talk to you about backing up your personal servicenow instance or as we all know them your personal developer instance if you've been on the developer uh website recently you may have noticed this Banner at the top where servicenow is letting us know that the backup and restore capability which by the way I have benefited from when I took vacation is no longer going to be available after December 15th now I'm not complaining about it I am super super grateful that I even have my own PDI and I'll call your attention to this link that they provide this is a Blog article written by Earl Duque where he goes through all of these steps that you might want to follow for backing up your personal developer instance and the data inside of it so he gives you three kinds of instructions using studio app engine Studio or update sets and one of the things that I wanted to highlight in this video is the let me search here is the ability to actually export data so one of the things he says is you can use this create application file in your list actions to back up the data to your code repository or your update sets and I actually hadn't heard about that before and I wouldn't play with it it was pretty cool so my but when I went and looked at the documentation this is really meant to provide like some sample data some demo data with your application so when someone installs an application that you made it's not empty or they don't have any sample data to actually look at so let's head over to my PDI I've got my Tokyo features this is actually the release note pages and what he's talking about is if you right click and do create application files you're going to get this prompt to add to the Tokyo features application from this table and you're going to load the data when it's a new install and upgrade or new install of demo data or just a new install period and what this is going to do if you look down below it I have 210 release note Pages it's going to create an XML XML file for each release note page with all the data that's inside of it and it's going to write that back to my update set or my code Repository depending on what I have configured and they're in a file called like metadata so servicenow actually refers to this as metadata now I want to show you what Justin actually does so I'm investing a lot of time and energy into my PDI in learning things for you all and discovering things and I want to make sure that I export everything that I need or back up everything they in case something happens or in case I break something that happened before so what I chose to do before I knew about this create application file is export sets so if we go to export sets in my instance I'll just go over here and we'll just click on all the export sets we should see that Justin has 26 update or export sets exporting to my mid server my mid server is actually loaded on the computer that I'm recording on now and you can see that it's kind of obvious right I've got some tables like the idea table the incident table knowledge articles knowledge bases project task projects and then my application site map and sitemap parts and Store app version history I'll just scroll to the right here and you can see Store applications stories Tokyo features right this is my data that I'm using to kind of generate this content that you're seeing on this channel and these get exported regularly like once a day once a week a couple times a week just depending on how often I thought I was going to be updating them but then something you might not have thought about is look at outside exporting I've got my data sources which are used by the export sets I got my export set definitions and my targets this is actually the stuff that creates the export sets right so I'm exporting those so I don't have to recreate them if I were able to release and reset my PDI here I have some transform maps in the transform map fields that I'm exporting so I've got a couple of imports as part of my applications and so I want to make sure I back up those transform maps that I created for those applications so you get an idea there of kind of what you can do and store those now let me show you what this looks like in my PDI so let's just go to here I'm going to clear the screen I'll clear that and I'm going to go into the folder on the mid server so we'll just hop over to snc midserver I think it's agent and then export right right and then there's my backups and so it's writing an XML file with the date and time appended to the end so that I know exactly when that was backed up and what I'm doing personally is copying these from my mid server to the server where my mid servers hope not server to the PC where my mid server is hosted and then moving those to a external hard drive so that in the event that I break something or I reset my PDI then I'm able to restore all my data and that's it I just wanted to show you an alternative to the create application file there's some limitations there on the create application file on how much data you should actually be exporting if you go look at the documentation you can see here they actually call out if you're trying to move data between instances um you should probably look into something else if there's large number of Records I'm anticipating you know hundreds of records of what I'm doing I'm not including just a few samples so that's an alternative export sets are a great feature out of the box from servicenow it's a platform feature I hope you found this video helpful if you did please like Please Subscribe or share with somebody who you think might be interested in backing up their personal servicenow instance or their personal development instance and until next time don't forget to always be learning foreign [Music]