Fixing Author-to-Author Migration Mistakes in AEM as a Cloud Service: How to Recover Publish State Correctly

Migrating from AEM On-Premise to AEM as a Cloud Service (AEMaaCS) involves a precise content strategy. The industry-standard and Adobe-recommended practice is:

• Author → Author migration for authored content

• Publish → Publish migration for live site content

  
  
  

This ensures that the AEM Cloud Publish environment accurately reflects real production, while Author carries the drafts, workflows, approvals, and creation history.

However, mistakes do happen—and one of the most common (and most damaging) is migrating everything from Author → Author and then accidentally publishing all content to Cloud Publish.

This article explains why this is a problem, what risks it introduces, and—most importantly—how to fix it safely and correctly.

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Understanding the Mistake: Author-to-Author Migration Followed by “Publish All”

In the mistaken scenario:

1. Your team migrated all content from On-Prem Author → AEM Cloud Author

2. Then executed a bulk publish, sometimes unintentionally

3. As a result:

   • Draft-only content is now publicly visible

   • Deactivated pages from on-prem are active again

   • Historical publish status is lost

   • AEMaaCS Publish does not reflect the real production environment

   • Audit records and approval workflows have been bypassed

This leads to a polluted publish repository, breaking the very purpose of maintaining a trusted live environment.

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Why This Is Serious

Incorrect publish data affects:

1. SEO & Public Visibility

Internal pages, test pages, and drafts may get indexed by Google.

2. Compliance & Governance

Pages that were intentionally un-published are suddenly active.

3. Authoring Confidence

Teams can no longer trust what is “live.”

4. Replication Metadata

Original activation dates, users, and states are lost forever.

5. Future Deployments

Content freeze and UAT validation become unreliable.

Fixing this requires a structured, safe approach.

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How to Fix Wrong Author-to-Author Publishing During Migration

Below are the best and safest approaches, starting with the recommended one.

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Option 1: Re-Do Publish Migration Properly (Recommended Solution)

This is the cleanest and most accurate method—ideal if you are still in pre-production stages.

Steps:

1. Reset AEM Cloud Publish Environment
   Request Adobe/Cloud Manager to wipe and reinitialize Publish.

2. Re-export content from On-Prem Publish

   Use cloned instance and Content Transfer Tool 

3. Import to AEM Cloud Publish → Publish
   This restores the true, correct, production content.

4. Re-run Author-only delta migration
   If content changed on on-prem author, sync only those changes.

Result:
AEM Cloud Publish now accurately matches your pre-migration live site.

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Option 2: Use Replication Metadata to Undo Incorrect Publishing

If restarting migration is not feasible, you can restore state using metadata.

Steps:

1. Export /var/replication metadata from On-Prem Publish

2. Compare it with AEM Cloud’s metadata

3. Identify:

   • Pages that should NOT be published

   • Pages that were previously deactivated

   • Pages with mismatched activation timestamps

4. Using a script or ACS Bulk Replicator:

   • Deactivate incorrect pages

   • Re-publish only valid published pages

This is effective, but not perfect—you may miss some edge cases.

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Option 3: Partial Cleanup for Limited Content Areas

Use this if only some sections of the site were impacted.

Steps:

1. Identify URLs incorrectly published

2. Get confirmation from business/UAT

3. Use Bulk Unpublish scripts to deactivate

4. Re-publish only approved content

Good for small or medium-sized sites, but not for large enterprise DAM/content.

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What You Should NOT Do

• Do not manually check pages one-by-one — impossible for large sites

• Do not trust authors to identify wrong-published pages — risky & incomplete

• Do not keep the polluted publish environment — it breaks future releases

• Do not adjust publish directly without metadata analysis — creates inconsistencies

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Recommended Final Strategy

If you need a clean and correct fix:

➡️ Reset Publish + Re-import Publish-to-Publish Migration

Then:

➡️ Run a delta Author migration

This is how 90% of enterprise projects recover from this mistake and move forward safely.

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Conclusion

Migrating to AEM as a Cloud Service requires strict alignment between Author and Publish flows.
When everything is migrated Author → Author and mistakenly published, it disrupts production integrity, governance, SEO, and live accuracy.

Fortunately, with the methods described:

• Full republish rebuild

• Metadata-driven cleanup

• Partial environment correction

You can restore your AEM Cloud Publish environment back to the correct state.

No matter where you are in your migration cycle, there is a safe recovery path.