Why You Should Back Up Your ServiceNow PDIs (And All Other Instances) Externally

Recently on developer.servicenow.com, ServiceNow announced that users will no longer be able to automatically restore an expired Personal Developer Instance (PDI) to a new one. This change will take effect beginning on December 15, 2022.

The article which accompanies the announcement explains how to use options such as Update Sets and GitHub to house backups and calls out the need for an external backup of PDIs:

“You should always be storing your backups in an external location outside of your PDI.”

Well absolutely! Who would want to risk losing the hard work and time invested into building and testing apps in their PDI?  In fact, you should back up all ServiceNow instances externally, not just PDIs. Here’s why:

1. It’s industry best practice to store data (including metadata) backups externally to the platform where it lives. This provides an independent copy of your data, should the platform become unavailable or in case you experience a significant data loss or corruption.  
2. An external backup also enables long-term retention of granular data snapshots (such as a daily copy of the data) from your instances, not only for recovery purposes, but also for audit and compliance reasons (retaining financial or HR records for 7 years for example).
3. At some point, most ServiceNow customers find themselves retiring an instance for one reason or another. Migrating all of the data from one instance to another instance isn’t always feasible. With an external backup, you have a way to access all of your data should you need to.
4. You can access and manage all of your backups from a single place, for all of your Prod and Sub-Prod instances, giving you greater visibility and control
5. Testing your development work becomes faster and easier as you can quickly validate any data changes (does the code change the data as intended?) in a Sub-Prod instance, then easily restore your test data as needed before running your test again.

An external backup solution can also give you:

• More control over your backups, allowing you to decide when backups are taken, what data to backup, and how long backups are retained
• An ability to restore data with greater ease, quickly and surgically restoring only the data affected by a data incident and avoiding the collateral damage that would otherwise be caused by rolling back an entire instance

Own Recover for ServiceNow

Building and maintaining an external backup solution is no easy task. That’s why Own (formerly OwnBackup) is here to help you implement a best-in-class backup and recovery strategy for all of your ServiceNow instances with ease and simplicity.

To learn more about Own Recover for ServiceNow, check out our website or request a demo below.