What is an overwrite: An overwrite is a refresh of a lower environment (e.g., Test or Dev) from an upper environment (e.g., Production). Community Brands uses a Managed Services Provider (MSP) to deliver this complimentary service. All communications are managed via Zendesk tickets and are processed during normal business hours. This process has been in place since 2011 and we process dozens of these requests every month.
How to prepare for an overwrite:
- Plan. From the time of your request to overwrite completion can take 5 business days or more depending on several factors.
- Communicate with your developers/partners. Make sure everyone knows what is happening so they can back up their work.
How to request an overwrite:
- Customer submits request via portal.
- Triage team reviews the request, verifying the request type, the sites, and versions for the source and destination. They respond to the ticket with a summary of our understanding of the request.
- Customer must respond to with confirmation that triage summary is correct.
- The Triage team submits the approved request summary to the MSP.
Note: If there is an issue, the triage team will communicate that on the ticket. The overwrite process cannot proceed until there is customer confirmation that the triage summary of actions to be taken is correct.
What happens during an overwrite?
- The MSP verifies the request and confirms space availability. They confirm the action to be taken by sending notice of the 24-hour waiting period. If there is not enough space, they return the ticket to the triage team, who will communicate the need for additional resources. The overwrite will not proceed until additional space is obtained.
- If there are no requests to cancel within the 24-hour waiting period, the MSP will execute the overwrite requested.
- Upon notification of completion from the MSP, the Community Brands team verifies that the site is operational and updates the Zendesk ticket to notify the customer.
Note: The Service Level Agreement (SLA) committed to from the MSP for standard tickets, which include overwrites, is 3 business days from the end of the 24-hour waiting period. Approximately 95% of requests for overwrites are completed by the MSP within 2 business days. Overwrites for large accounts may take longer due to lengthy restore times (8-10 hours) for exceptionally large SQL databases.
FAQ’s:
Why is there a 24-hour waiting period and can I just skip that? The waiting period is a standard protection practice which allows customers to give sufficient notice to any parties with in-process development work so they can back up their work before the site is overwritten. This has saved customers countless hours and dollars over the years by preventing re-work when overwrite requests were completed, only to then discover that there had been in-process development work that had been lost and needed to be recreated.
What happens if there is a problem? Issues with overwrites are extremely rare, but when they do occur, they are escalated to the Tier 3 Support team.
What is the difference between a database overwrite and a full overwrite? A full overwrite also includes NetForum application files on the web server.