How to restore from a backup

This is resurrecting a topic that came up a while ago. It is a matter that does give me some cause for concern. Although I am not currently facing the prospect of having to do a restore, I am very concerned that, should such a process be required, then it would be extremely difficult and time-consuming.

The previous response dealt with the complications of doing a restore on a multi-tenanted system such as Quickfile. I can appreciate the difficulties. The absence of an effective restore process does however give me certain difficulties

  1. I certainly do not feel that I can delegate any of the accounting tasks to the team for fear that they might damage existing transactions and that it could be very difficult to piece it all together again. In such circumstances, being able to simply restore from one of the weekly backups would be ideal
  2. I think that the absence of an effective restore process limits the degree to which the system could be adopted by businesses - because, in the event of a serious screw-up, they could be faced with a loss of data and audit trail.

Glenn, if you have not already done so, perhaps it is time to think this one through again. I am happy to discuss this with you off-line, should you wish.

Kind regards

Mike

Unfortunately there is no simple solution to this problem, cloud systems don’t have isolated resources so trying to do huge recovery operations on a specific account within a database containing 10s of millions of records is not something that can easily be done without taking the whole system offline.

This is not a coding problem it’s fundamental to the way databases work, you can’t re-index a database in a few seconds. This is without going into the complexities of merging data from an old database schema to a potentially newer one as the application evolves.

Fortunately most mistakes in Quick File can easily be undone, you can even use the event log as an audit trail. When users delete invoices en masse, all we do is flag the status of those invoices as DELETED, they aren’t actually physically deleted and can easily be restored. Bank transactions are the same and will only get physically deleted in 30 days.

To my knowledge there aren’t any cloud based systems that can do a “restore from backup” primarily for the reasons discussed. As long as you have your weekly backup set, you will have a collections of CSV you can use to manually compare and restore if required.

EDIT:

You mention about your reluctance to delegate tasks to your team for fear of corrupting existing information. This problem could be largely solved by setting restrictions on their account, i.e. just giving them the minimum permissions they need to complete the job.

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