Urgent: Very difficult Restoration from snapshot

[Daniela_Hecht]

I need to restore, or more exactly, copy part of a snapshot into the base we are currently using. I realize Airtable's intented way of restoring is just to go on using the snapshot instead of the latest version, but this is not possible in this case because there are too many extensions, apps and syncs connected to it + we haven't stopped using it .

Details and difficulties disclaimer:

The base is a very complex BOM with thousands of records made of different combinations of hundreds of records from 4 or 5 other nested tables where all the names/primary records of all those tables are a formula composed of abbreviations of those linked records. What happened is that I lost data from one of the innermost of those nested tables and that changed the formula names of the parent records, so I can't match them to their copy in the snapshot by finding each by name. The record ids in the snapshot are different than the original, so no api or copy paste method that i know about works, not by name, not by id.

What I need is some kind of automated solution that will find all the records in 2 of the tables of the snapshot that have no match (in all the human input fields) in the current version and create them in the current version by adding all the same human input values  from the snapshot, which includes linked records that may or may not exist in the current, and if they don't, would need to be created in the same manner.

[ScottWorld · Accepted solution]

You're right -- Airtable's snapshot system is highly unusable & essentially incompetent in situations like this, because Airtable doesn't retain the original Record ID's in the restored base. This is one of my big pet peeves with Airtable, and I would recommend emailing support@airtable.com to suggest that they fix this problem in future versions of Airtable.

In the meantime, it's possible that a solution for your situation could be automated with Make, although it might be relatively challenging to setup.

I am one of the top Airtable consultants. I charge for my introductory calls, but if you'd like to setup an introductory call with me to discuss your situation & show me your Airtable bases, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable Consulting — ScottWorld

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Hmm, if I were you I'd try:
1. Creating a new base with that snapshot
2. In the original base, create sync views of the relevant data that needs to be created and checked.  Now all of the data you need from the snapshot should also exist in your original base as new tables
3. Write some JavaScript in a scripting extension to do the checks and create the records and linked records as needed.  The sync views you created from step 2 will be used for the checking

There isn't that much Airtable stuff going on here actually, so any JavaScript developer would be able to help you with this once you've walked them through Airtable a bit and pointed them at Airtable's JavaScript documentation. 

Sorry to hear you're going through this!