Preferred method to sync content - from prod to stage - in AEM 6.4?

[dorianhallward]

Our content authors and AEM developers would like pages and assets hosted in AEM authoring and publishing 'staging' environments to be as similar as possible to the production environment, via an automated mechanism, (e.g an overnight 'rsync'-style copy).

What is the most straightforward and most reliable way to achieve this?  Essentially we'd like to copy the "diff" from live to stage, preserving anything on staging that is newer than live.  So far we have considered a few options, Jackrabbit vault rcp seems like the likely candidate but is still unsatisfactory, as outlined below:

• Package manager is problematic when it comes to downloading/ uploading large volumes of assets/ images.
• Adobe's online suggestions such as Grabbit and Remote assets weren't helpful on closer inspection.
• Jackrabbit vault rcp sounds like a great candidate but vlt rcp copy commands report "PathNotFoundException" when operating over https (with SSL keystores and parameters correctly set).  (Same vlt rcp commands work over http, so long as you know about FileVault vlt rcp does not copy binary data properly | AEM 6.3​(See my issue [JCRVLT-328] vlt rcp fails with https PathNotFoundException - ASF JIRA ) and when copying asset nodes runs very slowly, reporting "[ERROR] Error during intermediate save (3522); try again later: javax.jcr.ItemExistsException:".  (Is this just how the tool works, or are we using it wrong?).

[smacdonald2008]

You have access to replication API that can replicate content -- com.day.cq.replication.Replicator

You can build custom solutions using this API that can replicate AEM content.,

[dorianhallward]

Thanks for taking the time to reply smacdonald2008

What do other customers do: presumably this is a fairly common use case? Anything Adobe recommends as an OOTB solution (online backup? VM clones of live Aem instances?)

Any further info appreciated.

Regards Joe

[smacdonald2008]

Some of this content is discussed here - Replication

Packages is certainly a way to move content from 1 AEM instance to another. However - as you pointed out, all depends on the amount of data to be moved.

[smacdonald2008]

I spoke to some internal experts too. Response was:

Either they can setup a special replication client (Rep API), but a better option is to use CRX2OAK tool

[dorianhallward]

Thanks for asking smacdonald2008​ we hadn't considered crx2oak.  I will give that a try.

[salcap1]

@smacdonald2008 This is an old thread but something that just landed on my plate. A solution I had in mind feels wrong but I wanted to get the community's opinion. What if production author simply had a replication agent to the Stage environments?