Keep existing data when Sharing/Publishing with a changed Business Object (e.g. extra field)

Summary:

How to keep your existing data on a deployment when you have made changes to a Business Object (e.g. added a field to a BO)

Content (please ensure you mask any confidential information):

Hi!

Our business users would be entering much test data in the shared/published deployments, and would be ideal to be able to share/publish with changes to BO’s without losing all their data added to that deployment.

Normally when you Share an app you can specify to ‘use previous data’, and when you Publish you can click the flag to Keep existing environment data. But, it seems these only work if the BO structure hasn’t changed … after changing a BO to add fields, I get a REST 500 error when using the changed BO, unless I first Share with ‘Use development data’ or I Publish with a new version number. Both of these methods don’t retain the previous data in that deployment.