Transferring Content, Media, Members, and Forms

How to restore content in Umbraco Deploy using the deployment dashboard

After deploying changes to the metadata, it's time to transfer your content and media. This is done from the Umbraco Backoffice.

Content and media transfers are flexible which means you have complete control over which content nodes and/or media items you want to transfer - all in one go, a few at a time, or a single node.

Transferring content will overwrite any existing nodes on the target environment. Content transfers will transfer the items that you select in the "source" environment to the "target" environment the same as it was in the "source". This means that if you have some content on the target environment already, this will be replaced by the new content from the source environment.

Important: Content and Media transfers will only work if you've deployed all changes to your metadata beforehand. Please refer to our documentation on how to deploy metadata from either Local to Cloud or Cloud to Cloud.

Step-by-step

Let’s go through a content transfer step by step. Imagine you’ve finished working on new content for your project locally and you are ready to transfer the changes to your Cloud Development environment.

You want to transfer the whole site. You start from the Home node and choose to transfer everything under it:

1. Right-click ... next to the Home node in the Content tree.

2. Select Queue for transfer.

3. Alternatively, if you are in the Home page editor, you can go to the Actions dropdown and select Queue for transfer.

4. Choose if you want to include all items below the chosen page or only transfer the chosen node. Alternatively, right-click the Content tree and select Queue for transfer to transfer all your content at once.

5. Click Queue.

6. Select Open transfer queue. The Workspaces dashboard opens.

   • You will be able to see which items are currently ready to be transferred - this will include both content and media that you've queued for transfer.

7. Click Transfer to Development and monitor the progress of the transfer.

Once the transfer is completed, you will see a confirmation message stating that the transfer has succeeded.

Media Items

Media items are transferred the same way as content:

1. Right-click the items in the Media section and select Queue for transfer. Alternatively, right-click the Media tree and select Queue for transfer to transfer all your media at once.

2. Click Queue.

3. Select Open transfer queue. The Workspaces dashboard opens.

4. Click Transfer to Development.

Members and Member Groups

To be able to transfer Members and Member groups make sure that AllowMembersDeploymentOperations is configured to transfer and TransferMemberGroupsAsContent is set to true. This needs to be done in the appSettings.json file

"Umbraco": {
    "Deploy": {
        "Settings": {
            "AllowMembersDeploymentOperations": "transfer",
            "TransferMemberGroupsAsContent": true,
        }
    }
  }

Once the settings have been configured Members can be transferred in the same ways as both content and media from the Members section:

1. Right-click on the Members or the Member Groups folder and choose Queue for transfer.

2. Click Queue.

3. Select Open transfer queue. The workspace dashboard opens.

4. Click Transfer to Development.

Umbraco Forms

You'll need to ensure the TransferFormsAsContent the setting is set to true in the appsettings.jsonfile:

"Umbraco": {
    "Deploy": {
        "Settings": {
            "TransferFormsAsContent": true,
        }
    }
  }

Once the setting has been added to the source and target environment, Forms can be transferred the same way as content and media:

1. Right-click the items in the Forms section and choose Queue for transfer. Alternatively, right-click the Forms tree and select Queue for transfer to transfer all your Forms at once.

2. Click Queue.

3. Select Open transfer queue. The Workspaces dashboard opens.

4. Click Transfer to Development.

This does not include entries submitted via the forms.

TransferDictionaryAsContent

Deploy can be configured to allow for backoffice transfers of dictionary items instead of using files serialized to disk by setting TransferDictionaryAsContent as true.

"Umbraco": {
    "Deploy": {
        "Settings": {
             "TransferDictionaryAsContent": true,
        }
    }
  }

When changing the values forTransferDictionaryAsContent and TransferFormsAsContent to true,remove any .uda files for Forms and Dictionary entities that have been serialized to disk. These will no longer be updated. By deleting them you avoid any risk of them being processed in the future and inadvertently reverting a form to an earlier state.

Schema Mismatches

Sometimes a content transfer might not be possible. For example, if you add a new property to the HomePage Document type and you don’t have that property in the other Cloud environment, you’ll get an error with a hint on how to fix this.

clone dialog

If you are seeing this type of issue when trying to transfer content, refer to the Schema Mismatches article, where you can read about how to resolve the issues.