# Promoting a preparation across environments

The best practice when using Talend Data Preparation is to set up one instance for each environment of your production chain.

Talend only supports promoting a preparation between identical product versions.

To promote a preparation from one environment to the other, you have to export it from the source environment, and then import it back to your target environment.

For the import to work, a dataset with the same name and schema as the one which the export was based on must exist on the target environment.

Let's take the example of a simple preparation, used to remove invalid values and formatting errors from an Excel file containing customers data. This preparation is saved as customers preparation.

![](https://help.qlik.com/talend/en-US/data-preparation-user-guide/Resources/images/promoting_across_environments_1.png)

The following procedure will detail how to export this simple preparation into a file that can be reimported to a new environment.

### In this section

* [Exporting a preparation from the source environment](https://help.qlik.com/talend/en-US/data-preparation-user-guide/8.0/exporting-preparation-from-source-environment)
* [Importing a preparation to the target environment](https://help.qlik.com/talend/en-US/data-preparation-user-guide/8.0/importing-preparation-to-target-environment)