How to recover deleted data

How to recover deleted data

Firstly, there are many measures in place to reduce the likelyhood and impact of any data loss, from the general measures explained in the data protection page to organisation and individual user settings.

However, don’t panic if you do manage to overwrite or delete data and want to get it back. Just follow the steps below.

Retrieval mechanisms

Depending on the quantity of data overwritten or deleted, there are a number of steps you can take.

Data in a field deleted or overwritten

The record history feature can be used. Just scroll to the bottom of the screen when editing the record, click ‘history’ and you’ll see a list of all changes, when they were made, who made them and what the previous data was. Simply copy and paste that back into the relevant field

A record is deleted

An administrator can download the recent history of all changes in the system to a spreadsheet. It will show data removed in any record deletion, though not necessarily linked records - you can search the spreadsheet for edits to those records or see below

Restore from backup

Full backups are made daily, weekly and monthly. Whilst we’re not able to just restore a snapshot from the past with the click of a button (because other data may have changed since it was taken), we can restore it to a separate location that can be perused at leisure.

You can log into this separate instance, export any data necessary and import back into the live system.

There is a small cost associated with restoring the backup to cover the setup of a new temporary server instance.