Hot/cold backups for Clarity on a lower environment

Products

• Clarity PPM On Premise
• Clarity PPM SaaS

Issue/Introduction

Is it possible to use a hot backup for Clarity on a lower environment? Planning to export a copy of Production database with services still running for import later into a lower environment

Environment

Release: All Supported Clarity releases

Resolution

• Cold backup is a database backup taken with Clarity services stopped. Usually this happens during maintenance hours on weekends.
• Hot backup is taken with app services running and users connected
• There is a chance that some of the data is modified in the meantime, which could lead to different mismatches (including sequences mismatch, unable to export/import tables etc).
• Broadcom Support does not support hot backups for upgrade. 
• For all activities other than disaster recovery a cold backup should be used. This includes migrating environments, upgrading, changing hardware etc.
• Best practice is to get a recurrent cold backup during maintenance downtime and use it for restore to lower environments