I have three SDL Tridion environments: Dev, Test and Production. I want to refresh the Test and Dev environment with data from Production.
I would like the following things refreshed:
I have heard of Content Porter but am not sure
Could anyone please help me with these questions?
If you want to sync your Production environment back to Dev and Test and need it to be an exact copy, then the best thing you can do is make a backup of the Production CMS database and restore that on the Dev envrionment.
The only thing you will miss at that point is the what is actually published (the published state is there, but the actual files on your web server are not). To also sync that you should either republish everything, or restore a backup of the Broker database and a copy of the production web server also. But before doing that let me explain a few steps which you should take with regards to the database backup and restore:
before backing up your production CMS database (with the intent to restore it on a different server) you should stop all SDL Tridion services. If this is not possible on your production environment, then please refer to step 6.
backup your Production database with a full backup
stop all SDL Tridion services & IIS on your Dev envrionment
restore your Production database backup in the Dev Database instance (make sure to restore it as a full overwrite and using the original filenames)
when on MS SQL Server, make sure you drop the restored TCMDBUser and set the rights on your existing TCMDBUser for the newly restored database (necessary because you restored a database from a different server)
if all services were not stopped before the backup, edit the QUEUE_CONSUMERS table and set the IS_ONLINE filed for all records to the value 0 (all running services on the other machine at the time of the backup will show a 1, DO NOT delete any records from this table, just set the values to 0)
check if you need to change the domains for the local Administrator and MTSUser account in the TRUSTEES table (only change the NAME field on the records, do not change any of the other fields or add or delete any records)
start all stopped services again
edit all Publication Target Destinations to point to the correct server(s) (Dev)
(re)publish all content that you need again, or restore the Broker database and copy the content of your web server over.
This is the easiest an quickest way to get an exact copy of your environment synced back. You completely loose all changes you have made on Dev or Test, but if that is not an issue, then this certainly is the way to go.
