Major Issue - Airtable forgot all of the attachments? Or corrupted them? Now I can't upload?

[David_Brinkmann]

I use airtable essentially to create daily schedules.
These schedules are PDFS that i print from the layout extenions

i then upload the pdf to a seperate kanban view for employees on site to be able to go thru at start of day to know what they need to do.

All of sudden, airtable has "forgotten" or corrupted all of the pdfs or images that were in the table.

I can't upload anymore either. If I delete a corrupted file and try to reupload, it just reuploads a corrupted file that has a link to support center embedded if you try to open it as an attachment.

This effects the way I run this business pretty critically unfortunately. Maybe this is the equivalent of a storage capactiy paywall?

[RnJ]

I am seeing the same issue.

[ScottWorld]

All of my clients are experiencing this same problem. All bases in all workspaces are missing all of their attachments. This is not the right topic to be posting about this because it is the "show & tell" topic, and more importantly because Airtable employees never visit us here anyways. It's just us fellow Airtable users hanging out here. Be sure to send an email to support@airtable.com about this problem ASAP.

[David_Brinkmann]

thanks, I have submitted a bug report and will send an email as well.

I didnt immediately see a group for "big issues" in this community forum. I could have been blinded with seething rage though.

[ScottWorld]

Ha, I hear you!! I got word from Airtable that they are currently investigating.

[ScottWorld · Accepted solution]

It looks like it's working again for me now.

[Bill_French]

Let this be a subtle wake-up call to the risks of storing mission-critical data by value instead of by reference.

[David_Brinkmann]

What do you mean by this? I am not sure what I could have done differently that could have prevented this.

[Bill_French]

>>> What do you mean by this?

Storing documents by value means that you are making copies of the original in Airtable's storage environment. If for any reason that storage is compromised and there is no reference to the original source document, your system is deeply compromised as well. There are many reasons why we are attracted to attachment features. But there are some reasons you may want to avoid using this feature as well.

>>> I am not sure what I could have done differently that could have prevented this.

There's not much anyone can do about a platform failure. However, you should plan for such failures and one way to mitigate business operations is to capture and manage critical document artefacts separately (by reference) to avoid calamities when documents become unavailable.

Many other aspects of document management play into these decisions including but not limited to all the problems users have had with reliable uploads.