Restore Environments in ServiceNow

This article covers the environments which data can be restored to and the reasons for choosing each option.

​​Restoring to the Same Environment​​

Restoring to the same environment enables restoring of single or multiple ​tables​​ from an instance to the same instance. This feature is designed for the following use cases:

• Repairing data corruption or loss within an environment to restore any lost records and attachments.

​​Restoring Across Different Environments​​

Restoring to a different environment enables restoring of single or multiple ​tables​​ from one source instance to a different target instance. This feature is designed for the following use cases:

• Restoring production data into a sub-production instance to thoroughly validate and test the data before restoring or moving the data into a production instance. Restoring directly to production can pose significant challenges due to disabling existing business rules, workflows, and configurations. Restoring to a different sub-prod environment is a flexible and low-risk alternative.
• Restoring historical or archived production data into a sub-production instance to meet compliance regulations or audits. Recover for ServiceNow helps save money by storing regulated data with Own instead of paying for and storing it in a ServiceNow instance. Whenever you need the data to meet legal requirements, restoring it to a sub-production instance instead of production helps you meet legal requirements and minimize disruption to your business.

Restoring to a different environment has the following limitations:

• Restoring to a different environment is only available for data loss.
• Instead of comparing two distinct backups from the source and destination, restore compares two backups from the source instance.
• The table metadata must match between the source and destination tables for a restore to be successful. If not, restore completes with errors. For this reason, it is important to routinely perform production to sub-production clones.