Records gone missing, no evidence they were deleted

[Lindsey_Scalera]

Hi, for the first time in my approx. 2 years of using Airtable, I’m finding I am missing records. This has only happened in the past few weeks and it seems tied to something I’m doing, but I can’t figure out if I’m taking an action that is causing it.

I will outline step-by-step what I experienced.

1. I have a database of ideas and each is tagged to a particular topic. A colleague and I are working with those ideas, so I needed to copy them from the database and paste them in another program.
2. I created a filtered view for that topic and selected all the records in one column and using cmd+C copied the records, no problem.
3. Later that day, I click on my filtered view only to find that there are no records. I check main view and it seems my records are no longer there - I used my copy to search for a few of them, finding the are completely missing from the database. There is no record of them being deleted in the trash and the undo button does not restore them. There was no pop up warning when I was copying them.
4. I have thankfully been able to restore the records from snapshots.
5. Fast forward a few days and I went through the same process with another topic - these also turned up missing and I was able to retrieve them from my most recent snapshot.

I can’t figure out what is happening here.

For now, I am going to back up my entire database as CSVs, but this is quite alarming. I will also no longer copy columns out of the table and instead export it to CSV before copying what I need to use in other applications.

Please advise!

[kuovonne]

Welcome to the Airtable community!

You say that you have a filtered view and main view. Does the main view have a filter as well, or does it show all records? Does the filter have a time-based condition, or filter based on a time-based formula? Most of the time when records go missing without a trace, it is because they are hidden by a filter.

Copying data out of the base should have no affect on the data in the base. (Cutting data can remove data, but that doesn’t sound like the case.)

[Lindsey_Scalera]

Thanks! Good clarification - No the main view did not have a filter on and I removed all hidden fields, sorts, groups just to be sure.

I also used the search function (referencing the copy of the first column I had) to search for the missing records in the unfiltered view and they were not there.

Curious if anyone else has experienced this!

Quick Update: I had also contacted Airtable support to get their advice. They asked me the same questions and we determined that there was no good explanation as of yet. They promised to look into it and I offered to notify them if it happens again.

My goal is to either alert them to a bug or find out if I did something I could avoid in the future!

[ltani]

Hello, 

I´ve been experiencing something similar. Last year, I noticed that I lost some data. It made me really confused if  I had inserted it or not.   

This week, I was working on a grid and all of a sudden it disappeared!!! it wasn´t in trash or any other place and it never restored back. I had to create it again. 

I was just working now checking my data and when I went back it was gone again. 

Weird things has been happening with airtable and I´m afraid I had lost more data than I´m aware of. 

I hope they figure it out because I simply love to work with airtable!