Getting Started, had an unexplained bust attempt

[Tim_Ettenheim]

I’m just getting started, and had one bust of an attempt, so now want to ask about the best way to start before I have a second bust. I restore and sell vintage fountain pens, am looking to move to AT from several Google Sheets, and a ton of duplicate entry.

The variables I am transferring over are SKU (each pen in the pipeline regardless of owner), owner code, brand, model, and other fields that are descriptive to the pen but not to be linked.
I built a master tab with all of the items, as I had them described in Sheets; then added a brand tab and a model/submodel tab; and columns in Master for Brand and Model, linked to their tabs, and linked every pen in Master to a brand and a model. I sorted a few times to make sure it all made sense, then left it for a few days. Came back last night and the models and brands had gotten confused. SKU is unique; I added a number variable to be the primary variable.
Luckily I still have the spreadsheets, but where did I go wrong? Is there a way to lock down the work once it’s saved? What happened?
Many thanks,
Tim

[Andrew_Johnson1]

You can take a snapshot of your base
After which if something goes wrong you can always restore back to a earlier version.

Check out this link for a more detailed explanation.

Airtable - Support

Taking and restoring base snapshots

Using a base snapshot, you can back up a base and restore it to an earlier version. Airtable automatically takes occasional snapshots of your bases, and you can also manually take a snapshot. It ma...

[Tim_Ettenheim]

Andrew,
Well, that was a save…thank you! I restored to a version that looks clean!
What it does not answer is how it happened to begin with. Is it true that a sort on a field or on multiple fields automatically sorts the entire item with all of its fields, and that (unlike a spreadsheet) one does not have to select the entire flat range to sort all of it?

[Justin_Barrett]

Correct, a sort on a field reorders all records based on the sorted field’s contents. No need to select a specific range.

I’m not sure what would have happened that caused your base to get mangled, but I’m glad that you were able to recover what you’d done.

[Tim_Ettenheim]

many thanks, appreciated. The bust is still a mystery to me as well. But, I found the snapshot and moved on.
Tim