In addition to the information outlined in the previous section, Faculty Success is also prepared to support you and your campus in the event that you need to reverse changes that produced unintended results and restore data to a previous state.
In the event that you encounter a situation in which you believe we need to restore data, please submit a General work request with as much information on the circumstances as possible. Examples of helpful inputs include:
- The user(s) whose data are affected
- The screen or fields affected
- Any other details about the affected records, such as:
- The date you last viewed or retrieved the data
- Evidence of the change such as its presence in reports and screenshots
- Notes on any other changes made to the system (screen revisions, user account deletions, data deletion requests, etc.) that could have impacted the data for the user(s)
Upon receiving this request, we will begin investigation of the issue and will collaborate with you to develop a resolution plan.
Recommended Proactive Measures
To minimize the potential for, or guard against the impact of, situations in which data need to be restored it is recommended that you consider the following items:
- Fully evaluate the impact changes to screens and user accounts can have on the data in Faculty Success prior to requesting them.
- Example 1: A common example of a screen change that can affect data is the revision of a set of drop-down list values. Over time, you may need to revise the options available for a drop-down field. Simply removing an out-dated value will delete the data in that field for records that used that value. In some cases, this data deletion may be appropriate. In other cases, it may be necessary to update those records to contain a new value before we remove the out-dated value from the list of options.
- Example 2: Account deletions are the biggest change that can affect data. Because an account owns each record, deleting a user account also deletes all data stored for that account. Faculty Success is happy to collaborate with you to identify changes that can have an impact on data. If you have any questions about the revisions you are considering, please feel free to contact your Client Success Manager, or put a note in the work request asking our technical team to review and give advice on the potential data impacts of the change.
- Retrieve a copy of your data prior to making significant changes.
- Example 1: If you plan to delete a set of user accounts, use Run Data Exports to extract the raw data for those user accounts prior to deleting them. This backup can serve as a starting point if you need to provide those users with a copy of their data or find that a user was included in the list when he or she should not have been and you need us to restore the account.
- Example 2: If you plan to make a significant screen revision that will involve the movement of or changes to data, such as merging two screens of data that you collect into one, run an ad hoc report of the raw data for the screens prior to making the changes. Having such a backup enables you to compare the results of the merge against the state of the data prior to the change, and provides you with a file that you can use to restore data later, if needed.
- Consider implementing the Data Backups feature.
- You can use this to pull a weekly backup of all of the data your users have stored. You can find more information on this feature on the Home screen in Faculty Success, or in Data Backups.
