Everyone Should Recycle
I was helping a client of mine deal with a data import error yesterday. He accidentally imported 153 Contacts to the wrong Appeal Campaign, and he wanted help pulling them out. There isn’t an easy way to modify this data in a big batch in Salesforce.com, but the Data Loader is a great tool for the job.
I set up a quick web conference so he could watch me wield the Data Loader to get this job done and I promptly screwed things up. Rather than deleting the Contact’s memberships in the Campaign, I deleted the Contacts. 153 of his major donors were gone, just like that. Yikes.
So we had to go to the last backup and restore and then try to figure out what changes had been made since…oh wait, we would have had to do that with most nonprofit CRM databases, but with Salesforce.com we were back up and running in 2 minutes with no lost data. Because Salesforce.com recycles.
Each user has a Recycle Bin. It stores the last 5000 things they’ve deleted from Salesforce.com in the last 30 days, and allows you to restore them with the click of a button. We put the Contacts back, and all their relationships to Opportunities and Campaigns were put back as well. No sweat.
It sure saved my butt yesterday when I wasn’t paying attention while wielding a powerful tool. It will probably come in handy for you and your users at some point–so remeber to always recycle…
June 29th, 2006 at 12:42 pm
This is a great feature. To be fair, most modern db’s do this as well, including desktop NPO CRM’s. Metrix, ebase both have this.
June 29th, 2006 at 4:48 pm
I’ll second that Steve - luckily I was the guy who got to use the RB when someone else did the accidental deleting. I looked like a hero, for Salesforce.com’s great functionality…
June 29th, 2006 at 5:12 pm
Matthew, why do you have to go and inject fairness into this?
July 22nd, 2006 at 3:28 pm
Salesforce recommends you use the free weekly data export service to backup your data before you use the import tool for large imports too