Client copy from PRD back to DEV or QAS

[Former Member]

Greetings,

Over the last while our DEV, QAS and PRD clients have somewhat "drifted" apart from each other. We need to have these re-aligned with respect to:

u2022 Customising and local configuration

u2022 Cross-client customising

u2022 All development work

u2022 Authorisation objects and all the roles.

I am looking at doing a client export/import with SCC8 with copy profile SAP_EXBC (Customizing, Users and Cross-Client Customizing).

Clients, other than the target clients in our DEV and QAS will be deleted prior to the copies.

My questions are:

1. Will the Cross-Client Customizing part of the copy profile take care of all the development work, programmes, system variants, table definitions, etc. or is there an additional chunk of work that will need to take place to render the target client consistent with the source (PRD) client?

2. Are authorisation objects and roles included in the "Customizing" or the u201CUsersu201D part of the above copy profile?

Many thanks and apologies for the lengthy post.

Best regards.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Auf

Answer to your first question is 'yes'.

To your second question is, the profile you selected would export user master data as well along with the authorisation data.

My suggestion would be rather considering SAP_EXPC as your export profile.

Refer link:

http://help.sap.com/saphelp_sm32/helpdata/en/99/0a2a887e2511d2a6250000e82deaaa/content.htm

Rahul

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Rahul,

From your reply, I understand that:

The copy profile SAP_EXPC will take care of

u2022 Customising and local configuration

u2022 Cross-client customising

u2022 All development work

u2022 All the roles.

and no further work is required to make the target client consistent with the source client.

Please confirm.

Many thanks.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Auf

Yes. This should fulfill your requirement.

Rahul

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thanks very much.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hello Rahul,

One last question regarding this topic.

Will I need to apply Note 130906 ( How can versions be transported), while doing the copy with profile SAP_EXPC from PRD back to DEV?

Thanks.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi

This is required only if you want to maintain version history of your DEV system over the newly copied PRD data. If your requirement is to update DEV to bring it in Sync with PRD data, so that all the program and customization versions should be same in both the systems, this note doesn't seems to be applicable on your system.

Rahul

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thanks very much Rahul.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hello Auf and Rahul.

This thread is very interesting and will be useful for us. We face a similar challenge at present.

We have not copied back from PRO to QAS for over 12 months, and consequently our test environment has data that is out of date and poor quality, compared to our live environment.

We are starting to investigate the steps involved, and possible complications or risks, of creating a fresh client copy of our main PRO client back into a QAS client. The steps you have listed in this thread all sound relevant.

Are you able to advise of any standard 'client copy back checklists' on the SAP website or somewhere similar? If we could get a list of roughly what items we need to consider, and what problems we must overcome, then we could start to plan this project in detail.

It is difficult to know where to start. We currently have around 70 items in our QAS to PRO transport queue that will need to be resolved as part of this exercise. We are on release 4.7c.

Our in house BASIS and ABAP skills are limited, hence we have very low experience in this area. Any advice or links will be gratefully received.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Regards, Tom.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Thomas,

Apologies for the late response.

I'm afraid I do not have any specific check list. All I can suggest is:

1- Before doing anything, have a couple of good backups of the QAS database, prior to importing anything into it.

2- Make sure that you have plenty of disc space in QAS.

3- Ensure that there is enough space for the transaction logs in the target system. You might have to do frequent backups of the transaction logs to ensure that the import continues without interruptions.

4- To have an experienced Basis and ABAP persons available to troubleshoot any errors. In my view, something of this sort should only be attempted by a competent Basis person.

In our case, for volume testing (i.e. testing in a client with a large volume of data) I've installed an SAP instance on a separate server (called it TST) and put that server in the transport path. Then copied our PRD database to this new server. The database of this new system is refreshed regularly by a complete copy of our PRD system. The main cost here is the hardware (server plus disks), and someone's time to install the system.

You might also want to consider using some 3rd party software such as Test Data Migration Service (TDMS). I've attended a presentation on it and it looked very impressive. The cost, however, was a factor, so we've resorted to the method above.

Here's a link on TDMS:

http://www.sap.com/services/bysubject/customdev/tdms/index.epx

Good luck