[Music] hey everyone it's Justin thank you for watching and welcome to my house in this video I want to remind you and talk to you about maintaining and backing up your personal developer instance let's take a look at this email I just got from service now's developer program dear developer please save your work and release the current instance by the end of next week the instance has technical issues and must be retired and thanks for being an active member of the service now developer program okay so this is going to happen I can't extol enough the value and benefit of the personal developer instance program allowing you to run an instance of service now and learn how to configure the instance and test things and do different things I personally use a it for all of my content that I produce right here on the channel and I think the PSA that I want to leave you with is you need to back up your data and you need to be prepared for situations like these where you're going to have to rebuild your instance so let's talk about exactly how I do that in my instance and first I'm going to start off with the easiest thing that you can do is make sure you have a mids server setup I have one set up using a Docker container and it is active and up and running this is actually the instance that I need to release but I want to show you a couple things before I do so you've got your mid server once you have your mid server set up then think about the important things that you are doing in your instance and make sure that if they're important and critical to you if it's data you need to back up the actual data so you can use things like export sets that are a native part of service now and have those items I have 42 of them in my personal developer instance export to that mid server so I do this on a regular schedule and I also enhance this by on the Windows Server actually mapping or copying over all of the exports to my Google Drive so that there's a cloud copy in addition to my local copy in addition to my PDI so that's two backups for my pdi's data just the data piece so this is really really important the second piece that I've probably harped on many many many times on my channel here is to use Source control so anything that you do in your instance make sure you're doing them within an application you can see here I have my content helper service now release notes service now Store updates that's the one I use to actually crawl the store and if you have it tied to Source control you can make sure that your data is being saved and committed look at this we actually have um some available things to commit um it looks like okay my import sitemap uh wasn't saved off to service now so if I go ahead and check this one before I release my instance this is going to save everything to my code repository it just happens to be uh GI GitHub is what I'm using import sitemap update I don't actually know what that is I think it's basically the job I turned on and off as part of my flow or whatever but now it's taking my application any configurations that I've made and saving them to GitHub and I can take these and easily import them back into my new instance when I get my new instance so that's for number two you can actually go to uh this shortcut here CIS repoor config DOL I went here to get a list of each application that I needed to go look at and upload or sync or commit any changes I made so that's all been done the last thing is new to Vancouver I was able to do this because it bit me really hard on the last one is that I didn't keep track of all the applications I installed on my previous PDI the one previous to this one well luckily the new application manager in Vancouver gives you a neat thing I'm going to go ahead and pointed out here with my pen and it's called activity log so what I did is I went into my activity log and I copied and all of this stuff so I did see more uh see more as many times as I could uh which showed me everything from the time that this instance was created app engine Studio there's my integration Hub spokes flow designer PPM events and jobs all the different stuff that I installed I copy and pasted all this into a document so the first thing I do when I get my new PDI before I import anything from SCE code before I import any data is I'm going to go install all the plugins and apps that that data and those backups are actually using so it's going to save me some time so now with you here with me let's go ahead and release my developer instance we're going to do that together uh let's say I'm going to open a new tab and it is going to ask me to log in which I need to pull my login here on a different screen let's see copy password and we'll go ahead and sign in I usually log into my PDI directly and don't come through here unless I absolutely need to the only thing I'm blurring out on that screen is my email address I'll have to forgive me I don't want that on the internets forever even though it's probably pretty easy to find at this point but now we're in the developer portal this is the PDI that they want me to release so notice in the instance actions that you access um right here let's go ahead and try that again with the rectangle in the instance actions there is a release instance and you get to there by clicking on your initials in ight hand quarter is how you open up this menu so I'm going to go ahead and release the instance now that I have back up actually I need to back up one more thing come back over here to the developer portal I'm going to release the instance uh by releasing instance you allow other developers to use that resource remember that this action doesn't give up your access to the site you only lose access to your personal developer instance if you changed your mind you can always request a new instance from the homepage uh reason I'm selecting uh let's see other reason I'm having a different no they told me to do this uh service now instructed me to release the instance due to technical issues got my reason in there service now instructed me to release it so we're going to go ahead and release the instance and I'm then going to request an instance we're going to pick Vancouver and hit request and now I will wait on that to request so hopefully this was a good PSA and reminder to make sure you are backing up your personal developer instance in service now make sure you take advantage of the things I showed you there set up a mid server super easy to do I have a video that shows you how to do it make sure you're exporting your data make sure you're syncing your apps to Source control and for that matter make sure any changes you making you're making or configurations you're doing are associated with an app that's synced to Source control that way all you have to do is come in here commit commit commit commit do your exports and go get that application history from the application manager like I showed you and you'll be in business watch for another video where I show me rebuilding and a happy Justin in his new PDI I hope you found this video helpful if you did please like Please Subscribe or share it with somebody who you think might be interested in strategies for backing up and saving and restoring their personal developer instance and until next time don't forget to always be [Music] learning [Music]