Once you complete your project and have it in production, it is a good idea to have a separate Ignition development server for making future changes. That way, the changes will not affect the plant floor and can be completely tested before rolling out to the production environment. Also, it is important to have a development server to perform any Ignition upgrades on so that any problems can be addressed before moving to a production environment.

There are a few things to consider when having a production and development server. First, the development server should have its own PLCs and SQL databases. You do not want the development server to point to the live PLCs because it would be possible to accidentally write values to PLCs that may start or stop equipment. Likewise, you do not want the development server to point to the production database or else you may risk duplicating data.

Second, the development server does not need a license because you can run the server in its two hour trial mode.

Third, you should never move a Gateway backup from the development server to the production server.The development server is pointing to the development PLCs and databases. If you move the Gateway backup, these connections will be saved inside the backup and restored on the production server. Which is bad because the production server should be pointing to the live PLCs and databases. Instead you should backup individual projects and tags separately and move them to the production server.

Ignition projects use database connections and tags but only by name so the production server and the development server will have the same PLC and database names. But behind the scenes, they will point to different places. You cannot simply backup and restore a project from the development server to the production server because the projects contain the windows and the templates and not the tag information. You will have to transport the tags as well in addition to keeping track of changes on the production and the development server to ensure that the tag folder path coincide with the ported project.