True Sheet Backups

Chuck Davis

We are trying to create sheets to track the engineering, purchasing and production tasks required to build a large piece of industrial machinery in a small shop.

 

The may be 30 jobs in process at a time and each job may take several months to complete. Each job will have its own sheet and have up to 150 lines.

 

To schedule each job, so that it is completed on time, requires coordination of up to 10 people.

This means that each sheet represents many hours of discussions and coordination.

 

To lose a sheet or data on a sheet would have a fairly major impact and reduce the credibility of the system (and my credibility also).

 

I trust Smartsheet not to lose data and to have good backups for their own purposes.

 

My concern is that new users (or a user having a bad day) might make major, incorrect changes to a sheet that would take some time to recover from.

 

I am concerned that the normal backup just backups to an Excel spreadsheet and then not in a form that can be completely and easily restored without some work and maybe some confusion.

 

My back  ground is in ERP/Database type systems where a restore would get you back exactly to the last backup if something bad happened, without having to do any work to reconstruct data.

 

It seems this could be achieved in Smartsheet by being able to schedule a Save as New on each sheet (with a time stamp in the saved sheet name) to be backed up. Of course the schedule would have to take into account the size of each sheet being backed up as well as how many backup versions were retained to manage space requirements. (Our data usage is low and disk space is cheap.)

 

There seem to be two other ways to achieve this.

 

1) The Backup Tool in Apps & Integrations, although that seems to involve a very complex technical project.

 

2) Services from the Smartsheet Backupify partner, although they seem to have been removed from the Apps & Integrations section as a partner.

 

I would appreciate any insights that anyone may have that would make me feel better about the possibility of losing data,

 

Thanks.

 

John Sauber

The backup tool you refer to in step 1 is extremely simple for any network administrator to handle. You have to read the documentation, or have your admin do it, and you'll be pretty well set-up. If you use formulas in your sheets, as we do, recognize that those will not be preserved in the backup (we have requested this feature be added, however).

 

We take 4 backups of all of our sheets each weekday, throughout the workday. This is done by putting some commands in a batch file, and running the batch file as a scheduled task. Be careful of attachment sizes, however, because if, for example, you have 100 GB of attachments throughout your organization, and you run the backup 4 times each week day, then you'll end up with 2TB of attachments in your backup repository.

 

Smartsheet support can help with any questions on the backup tool, but do read the documentation first. It's pretty simple.

Chuck Davis

John,

 

Thank you very much for answering my question so quickly! In ten minutes you resolved something that has been bothering me for months!

 

Chuck

Brad Jones

 

+1 vote for True backups.

Currently I create and save a copy of the sheet for backup somewhere in my SS folders.  Unfortunately this eats into my total sheet count, but as far as I have found it is the closest to a REAL backup that you can get in SS.