til/planetscale/seed-production-data-into-another-branch.md

Seed Production Data Into Another Branch

When you create a Planetscale branch off main, it will only copy over the schema. No data will be copied over to that new branch.

You can copy data over from the initial branch (main) in two steps from the CLI. First, create a dump of the branch. Then restore the dump into your new branch.

$ pscale database dump database-name main --output ./dump

That creates SQL files locally in the dump folder with both schema and data statements.

That folder of SQL files can then be restored into one of your branches.

$ pscale database restore-dump database-name branch-name --dir ./dump --overwrite-tables

The --overwrite-tables flag is needed because your branch's existing schema will conflict with the create schema statements in the SQL files.

You can pscale shell into that branch and run a select ... statement to check out the data.