Deleting fields by accident

[JN_tp]

Hello everyone

I am looking for some reassurance on how to manage the risks associated with growing number of “Creators” in my base.

There would be a operational and financial cost if a key field, table or base was deleted by accident (or by a disgruntled employee).

“Interactive complexity” (multiple components interacting together e.g. here the links between fields/tables in the schema) and “tight coupling” (how close the dependencies are linked and the period of recovery e.g. filters are broken immediately when a field is deleted) means that there will inevitably be an accident over some period of time.

We manage this risk by having highly centralised control of who can be a Creator (only me currently).

When recovering in instances where a field is deleted, the options offered by Airtable don’t really help us:

• Snapshots would only allow returning to an older version but in an entirely new base (thereby not recovering the original base and it’s links to other integrations).
• Crtl z / back / Airtable restoration would return the deleted field but it would not restore the filters where that field was used and any views linked to automation triggers would have released the data. By that point all the automations would have been triggered (eg Make, zapier)

How does everyone else manage with many people working as creators in a base?

[Hannah_Wiginton]

Hey there,

As far as fields, tables, and views, you can limit this by making Users at an Editor level rather than Creator, which is what you've already done.

This is where 3rd party tools that act as a portal or dashboard come in extremely useful. You're sharing data to create or edit, but not allowing any schema changes or allowing access to the base.

We have a couple of tools to help with both options - On2Air Forms for dashboards and On2Air Backups for data backups outside of Airtable.

On2Air Forms lets you create dashboards of records/fields that you can share per person. You don't have to create them as a User and you can customize what they view/edit.

On2Air Backups creates automated backups of the data itself and sends it to Google Drive, Dropbox, or Box. That way, you always have a version of your data.

Airtable has restore capabilities, so it's encouraged to use those first if a field or value is deleted. If you were to completely lose your base, no 3rd party tool is capable of re-building it from scratch (and some say they can, but it's against Airtable terms of service.) Airtable doesn't yet make that possible for a 3rd party tool to programmatically restore a base/table (can't create formulas, etc).

We are working on a feature to back up the full Airtable base structure (field names/ids/types and view info) - that is expected to come in Q2 this year.

We also have On2Air Schemas that will backup your full schema along with your formula values (not currently available in On2Air Backups)