Transfer Items

How to transfer content, media and forms between your environments.

Once all code and metadata are in sync between your environments, it's time to transfer your content and media. This is done from the Umbraco Backoffice.

Transfers are flexible, which means you have complete control over which items you want to transfer. You can transfer it all in one go, a few at a time, or transfer only a single item.

Transferring items will overwrite the same item on the target environment if it already exists. A transfer will transfer the items that you select in the "source" environment to the "target" environment exactly the same as it was in the "source".

Transfers will only work if you've deployed all changes to your metadata beforehand. Please refer to the documentation on how to deploy metadata to learn more.

Transfer Queue

The first step when transferring items from your environment is to add them to the Transfer Queue. You can add items to the Transfer queue from the following sections:

• Content from the Content section.
• Elements from the Library section.
• Media from the Media section.
• Forms from the Forms section (additional configuration is required).
• Members and Member Groups from the Members section (additional configuration is required).

Choose between two methods when adding items to the Transfer Queue:

• Option 1: Add a specific item, specify variants, and include/exclude subitems.
• Option 2: Add everything from a specific section (Content, Media, Library, or Forms).

Add items to the queue

The steps below take you through the options available when choosing Option 1:

1. Click on the ellipsis node next to the root item in the tree.

   1. For Option 2, click on the ellipses next to the tree title (Content, Media, Elements, or Forms).
2. Choose Add to Transfer Queue.
3. Select the culture variants you want to add.

   1. Only languages for which you have permission to access will be selectable.
4. Choose to either publish the content directly after transferring or set a specific date and time.
5. Choose whether or not to include any subitems.

Queue for transfer window

1. Click Submit to add the content to the Transfer Queue.

Transfer queued items

Once you have items in your Transfer Queue, a notification icon is added to the Environment name in the top-right corner. The number is increased depending on how many different items are queued.

1. Open the Deploy Overview by clicking on the Environment name.

1. Review the items added to the Transfer Queue.

   1. 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.
   2. Hover an item to get the Remove option, or use the Refresh and Clear queue options found via the arrow at the bottom.
2. Click Transfer to [Environment name] to transfer the items to the next environment.

Transfer queue

The transfer can take a few minutes, depending on the number of items being transferred to the next environment. You can follow the process from the Deploy Overview.

When the transfer is done, close the Deploy Overview and verify that the items are now available on the next environment.

Transfer 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 as described using steps above.

Transfer Forms

For Deploy to handle Umbraco Forms data as content, you will need to ensure that the transferFormsAsContent setting in the configuration is set to true. See details in the Configuration article.

This does not include entries submitted via the forms.

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 both environments, you’ll get an error with a hint on how to fix this.

Schema mismatch

This type of issue can occur when transferring content. See the article about Schema Mismatch errors to resolve schema mismatches.