Need reliable, consistent, and FULL Airtable backups

[ScottWorld]

We see Airtable horror stories like this one all the time:

Restoring a Workspace Formulas

Please help! I did the most idiotic thing you could imagine — I deleted my entire workspace! I have one base there that is my entire business. How can I retrieve it? I know that there are snapshots but how can I locate them when the workspace has been deleted? Please help… the tech support could take days to get back to me and I have clients to deal with.

Please read that entire thread before responding here.

Without reliable & consistent backups built into the Airtable platform that actually backup the entire database & entire workspace on a regularly consistent basis, Airtable really can’t be depended on for mission-critical business operations.

Even the snapshot feature isn’t reliable, because it kicks in randomly whenever it chooses to do so. But if you accidentally delete an entire database or workspace, even the (unreliable) snapshot feature is no good.

Please read that entire thread before responding here, because I go more into depth in that thread.

In summary: Airtable really needs the ability to have full backups of full databases and full workspaces, and those backups need to be consistent, automatic, and reliable.

[Justin_Barrett]

ScottWorld:

We see Airtable horror stories like this one all the time:

Maybe you’re seeing something different than I am, or maybe I’m forgetting some instances, but in the four months I’ve been here this is the first time I’ve seen mention of someone deleting their entire workspace.

I’m not saying that a full backup solution isn’t needed, because it is. It just feels like a bit of an exaggeration to say this comes up “all the time.”

[ScottWorld]

Right, I didn’t necessarily mean on this forum… I was talking about my own personal experiences with my own private clients emailing me privately (saying that they’ve accidentally deleted a record or an entire table or an entire base).

Just like you, this is also the very first time I’ve heard of an entire workspace being accidentally deleted. But it falls under that same umbrella of accidentally deleting an entire table or base.

[ScottWorld]

p.s. What’s ironic is that Airtable is soooo incredibly easy to use that everybody feels like they can just jump right into creating their own databases! This is great! :slightly_smiling_face: Yet Airtable unfortunately extends that same ease-of-use to deleting things, which I personally feel is a bad thing.

[openside]

We can handle external full backups (including attachments) at Openside. Feel free to reach out if needed.

Dan
dan@openside.com

[ScottWorld]

openside:

We can handle external full backups (including attachments) at Openside. Feel free to reach out if needed.

That’s great to hear! How do you guys do it (from a technical standpoint)?

[openside]

We have software that extracts your data from the list of tables provided and uploads each table in its own json or csv file to either Google Drive or Dropbox (for now). Then for each specified attachments column, we upload the attachments into a folder.

Data is a full snapshot (or can be limited by view/formula). Attachments are incremental.

Currently we only make this available to our higher end clients paying ongoing support contracts with us, but we are in the process of making it a standalone product as part of the On2Air family (On2Air: Backups). So depending on your clients needs we can either figure something out now, or wait till the self-serve product is ready (likely later this summer).

[ScottWorld]

This is fantastic. Thanks! :slightly_smiling_face: