System Refresh

[Former Member]

Hi,

Is there any sap notes or standard best practices that define how often should we perform the system refresh from PRD to QA/DEV?

Thanks,

KJ

[Reagan]

Hello

The basic idea of using a test system is to test everything before you bring them on to the production system. That is the reason why you refresh the test system with production data in order to understand the impact of the objects you bring in (especially the home grown ABAP's).

This is a question which should be checked with the business and the development team because it depends on the nature of the business.

A typical example of a system refresh is when you have plan a SP stack upgrade on the SAP system. You will only upgrade the SP on the production system once you have done with the development and test systems. If you refresh the test environment and then do the upgrade before the production you can identify the possible issues you can encounter in the production after the upgrade. Again this is just an example and one of the many reasons for a system copy.

There is no standard practice as to when and how often the test system has to be refreshed. (As far as I know). Else it would have been mentioned in any of these SAP Notes:

Note 547314 - FAQ: System Copy procedure

Note 89188 - R/3 System copy

Regards

RB

[Former Member]

Thanks everyone.

[Sriram2009]

Hi 

It depends on your business requirement you can define the policy for every 6 month or a year, you can perform the QA refresh from the PRD. In SAP there is no Note or standard document that defines the frequency for QA refresh.

Thanks

Sriram

[Former Member]

Hi

As mentioned in the earlier blog there is no such time frame mentioned in any note . Refresh date just depend on the Project that are deployed in production and how offen you need the real production data to do quality or regression for testing of the next project going in production.

Team ususlly do refresh if they think that the quality data is quite old or if the next deployment is effected by the data in quality and the test case might not give the exact result as they might behave in production.

Thanks

[Former Member]

Hello,

Since you want to refresh from PRD, you will do the same using backup/restore method. (since chances of getting downtime for export of prod are almost nil and it means export/import is not an option)

Backup/restore is database dependent activity. So you will have to find steps specific to your database.

For post steps, you can also use SAP's System copy guides available on http://service.sap.com/instguides.

Regards,

Denish

[Former Member]

Hi Denish,

Thanks for the system refresh procedures/steps.

But my question, is how often should we perform the system refresh, i.e. every 3, 6, 12 months?

Just wondering any sap notes or standard best practices that recommend the duration.

Thanks,

KJ

[Former Member]

Hi All,

As a part of system refresh there are different methods to do it which are mentioned in the guide in service market place .

Usually client don't do refresh of development system as there is risk of loosing the development object that have not been sent to production or loose the history of developed object and the transport holding that version.

Use backup/restore mechanism or user system copy mentiod using sapinst.

Please let me know your comments

Thanks

[Former Member]

Hello KJ,

There are no standard rules / SAP notes about when to perform system refresh activity. It is always carried out based on the business requirement and varies from client to client.

In case of 3 system landscape, normally quality system is kept as close as possible to production system so that testing can be carried on the most recent data.

To achieve this, quarterly refresh is a good option but again it depends on the business requirement.

Regards,

Denish