Restoring Data

When you need to restore data from a backup, first open your backup and switch to its Snapshots tab. Then simply perform the following steps:

1. Open the snapshot with the necessary data, browse its data, and select checkboxes for data you want to restore. You can select checkboxes for separate records or whole objects.

2. Click the Restore button and select the operation to apply for the selected data — Insert, Update, or Delete.

   When restoring data while viewing data changes, you don’t need to select the operation manually. Skyvia selects the operation to apply that undoes the selected change: inserted records are deleted, deleted records are inserted, and updated records are updated with their previous values.

3. For Insert operation, you can optionally select another connection to restore data to in the Restore details dialog box. Then simply click Apply, and the data will be restored.

Restoring data in general is as simple, as three steps described above. Below I describe some more specific restore scenarios.

Restoring Related Data

If you want to restore related records with their relations, for example, a Salesforce Account and all its Contacts, you must select and restore all the required related records in one restore operation. If you restore them separately, the relations may be lost.

This is because when a record is inserted in a cloud application, it gets a new Id value. When you restore its related records that reference it by an old backed up Id value, the relation cannot be restored using this old value. If you restore the related records in one operation, Skyvia retrieves the new Ids and build relations between restored records correctly, but this cannot be done when restoring related records in several restore operations.

Skyvia allows you easily navigate by relations when browsing data and quickly select all the related records. When you view data, you can see the Action column on the left with the Details link for each record. It opens record details, where you can see all the record fields and all the backed up records that reference the current record.

Thus, for an Account record, this page display all its related Contacts and other records, so you may quickly select them from here. Moreover, you can navigate to the details of these related Contacts and see and select their related records. Besides, the foreign keys, referencing parent records, are displayed as links to their details, so you can easily navigate to them and select parent records too. You can find more details here.

After you selected all the necessary records, click Restore. Then select the operation to apply for the selected data - Insert, Update, or Delete and click Apply.

Finding and Restoring Specific Record

If you need to find and restore a specific record, you can use backup search. Skyvia offers powerful data search functionality for your backups. You can search your backed up data by a fragment of one of its fields. For example, if you want to find a specific account in your backups, you can find it by a part of its name, address, phone, etc. You can find more information about backed up data search here.

Thus, you can easily find the necessary record and then use the Search in older backup/Search in newer backup buttons near the Type to search… box to navigate to its newer/older versions in order to find the necessary version of the record. After you found it, select it and click Restore. Then select the operation to apply for the selected data - Insert, Update, or Delete and click Apply.

Restoring Separate Field Values

Skyvia allows restoring even separate field values. If you made some undesired changes to a field and want to restore the previous value from backup, you can do it in the following way:

1. Find the necessary record using search as described here.
2. Continue Search in older backup till you find the version of a record with the necessary value of the field you want to restore.
3. Click the Search in newer backup button once to open a snapshot that was made after the change you want to revert.
4. Click the Changed button to see the data changes. It should display the record as updated (with the mark).
5. Click the Select Fields link for the record in the Action column.
6. After this you can see the list of changed fields, and their old and new values. Make sure that this is the change you want to undo.
7. Select the checkbox for the field you want to revert to its old value and click Restore.

This procedure is for a case when an undesired change was made some time ago, several backups were already made since the change, and you don’t know which snapshot contains the necessary version of a record. If you know exactly when the change was made, simply open the data of the necessary object in the first snapshot made after the change, find the necessary record using the Type to search… box, and proceed directly to the step 4. If you don’t have a snapshot made after the change, you will need to create one first.

Bulk Restore

If necessary, you can restore all the records in a specific object or all backed up objects from your backup. When viewing snapshot details you can select checkboxes for the backed up objects, and this selects all the records in these objects. Then you can click Restore and select the operation to apply to the records. To select all the objects, select the checkbox in the header of the grid with objects.

Skyvia only performs the selected actions for selected backed up data. It does not restore the data in the source to its original form completely, for example, it does nothing to the newly created records that wasn’t backed up yet.

If you want to restore all the data or a specific object to a point of time when one of your snapshots was made, you can do it in the following way.

1. Create a new snapshot. Restore in Skyvia won’t affect the records that are not backed up yet, so, if you want to restore data to the previous point in time, you need to have all the data backed up.
2. Make sure that the snapshot for the date you want to restore data to is displayed in the list of the snapshots. If it is not displayed, make sure that the All time period is selected on the Snapshots tab, and scroll down till you see the required snapshot.
3. After you see the required snapshot, scroll up to the most recent snapshot and click it.
4. Click the Changed button.

5. Click the down arrow to the right of Changed since <date> and select the date/time of the snapshot you want to restore data to.

   

6. If this backup pair was never compared, the corresponding message is displayed. Click the Compare Now button to compare backups. Note that it can take some time if there is much of data backed up.

   

7. Select checkbox for the corresponding object or for all the objects and click Restore. Then click Apply.

   

Restoring Data to Other Connections

Skyvia allows you to restore data from a backup to another connection. The connection must be to the same kind of the cloud application, that the data are backed up from. This means that, for example, if you have backed up data from Salesforce, you can restore them to another Salesforce organization, but not to Dynamics 365 or other cloud applications.

To restore data to another connection, select the necessary data and click Restore. Then click Insert Records and select a connection to restore data to.

Selecting a connection is not available for Update and Delete operations as well as when viewing and undoing data changes (using the Changed view).

More Complex Scenarios

If you need to perform even more complex restore operations, for example, use Upsert or restore only records that meet some criteria, you can use Skyvia’s Data Integration functionality with your backed up data. You can create a connection to your backed up data and then configure an Import Package that loads data from your backup to your data source. Import packages provide advanced functionality such as source data filters, expressions, all DML operations support including UPSERT, and many others.