🧪✨ Cloning a sandbox from your production app — selectively, safely, and without breaking connections

Knacksters' Idea Lab
1

Hi guys — another little story from the workbench

You know that feeling when you want to test something risky on a real app — a schema change, a big import, a new automation — but you can’t do it on prod, and spinning up a fresh sandbox means losing all your real data? Or busting your plan’s record limit by duplicating everything? Or you end up with an empty copy that tells you nothing about how things will actually behave.

So I built a tool that lets you selectively clone production records into a sandbox copy of your app. You flag exactly which records you want (a few customers, a handful of orders, one warehouse, etc.), and everything gets cloned over cleanly.

Here’s the gist:

  • You pick what gets cloned: add a simple _sdbx checkbox field to any table, flag the records you care about, and only those get copied — no more, no less
  • Works with your existing sandbox: duplicate your app in the builder (no records, no tasks), and the tool fills it with real data on demand. Clone again later to refresh or add more
  • Dedup built-in: each cloned record is tagged with its source ID, so re-running the tool is safe — already-cloned records are skipped, not duplicated
  • Preview first: a read-only preview shows you exactly how many records per table will be cloned and how many API calls it’ll cost — so no surprises
  • No accidental emails to real customers: every email field gets rewritten to a reserved .invalid address during cloning, so any automation that fires in your sandbox is guaranteed to never reach a real inbox. No bounces, no spam complaints, no risk of getting your Knack account flagged. You can always swap one back to a real address if you actually need to test delivery
  • Safe by design: source apps are locked read-only, connections are stripped by default (to avoid dragging in unwanted linked records), and user roles can optionally be cloned with mangled logins to avoid collisions
  • Reasonable API budget: cloning a few dozen records across half a dozen tables takes under 100 API calls — nothing compared to how much time you’d burn recreating test data by hand

Perfect for anyone who wants to test builder changes, train new users on realistic data, debug weird edge cases with actual production records, or keep a lightweight staging environment in sync without duplicating the whole app.

If this sounds useful, feel free to reach out. Happy to discuss the modalities, fees, and how it could fit your setup — Classic and Next-Gen both supported.

Normand
Cortex R&D Inc.

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