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Smartsheet Backup and Recovery

Moxam
Moxam ✭✭✭

We would like Smartsheet to provide a mechanism to do a full backup and restore of related files. While a step in the right direction is the ability to restore to a previous version of a sheet, we find that in an integrated environment, this would not be sufficient:

We have a single worksheet that drives multiple reports and dashboards.

We have also created many dynamic views that are embedded in dashboards.

Finally we have deployed these to users through Workapps.

In the event of a problem in the source sheet, receiving an excel backup (or saving the sheet with a new name at a point in time) is not a sufficient backup, as the integration to reports, dashboards, dynamic views, and work apps would all need to be reconnected.

We hope Smartsheet can create backups of the environment and allow users to select which items to recover from a point in time backup (e.g. Daily). Ideally users could select which items to restore to ensure integration and links from that point in time were respected (at least within a given workspace).

Thanks for considering this request.

82
82 votes

On Wishlist · Last Updated

Thank you for sharing - we hear you on this problem. We are investigating ways to make it easier to back up your data while preserving critical functionality. If we have updates for you we'll plan to change the status here. In the meantime, please keep voting on this and other ideas.

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Comments

  • Steve Sanders_NCSU
    edited 03/06/24

    Please make the undo button active. Or at the very least, make it possible to restore your sheet to a previous version.


  • Melaniejmorrison
    Melaniejmorrison ✭✭✭✭
    edited 11/08/23

    Autosave should be a seamless user experience like it is with Google, instead of users having to manually turn it on and choose how often changes are saved. It is also very strange to me that you can only download a backup once every 24 hours. Given that you can't go back and restore a previous version like you can in Google, this is very frustrating especially if you are a project manager and make a lot of changes to plans within a given day.


    That leads me to version history. Just like Google suite applications, I should be able to not only see version history, but be able to choose a version to restore from, which I cannot do and it's frustrating. It's especially cumbersome when you are testing out automations, formulas, or workflows. I have had glitches with formulas and workflows that have wiped out 100's of rows, and because there was no version history restoration I had to re-enter all of those things.

  • Rachel Beck
    Rachel Beck ✭✭✭✭
    edited 04/15/24

    100% agreed. We recently had a user accidentally delete 29 rows on a customer's sheet. Unfortunately, the rows had attachments and comments that needed to be restored, and the csv file download from the activity log was only a fraction of the data lost. After reaching out to customer support, I was informed that restoring all attachments is not guaranteed. I am honestly surprised Smartsheet does not have a better backup feature. This seems pretty basic.

  • Agreed, we need a true backup option! Especially given the glitch that allows rows to be overwritten if two people have a sheet open at the same time, we need to be able to see multiple past versions in order to recover lost data.

  • Hi crawlings, what 3rd party option is this for Smartsheet Solution/Environment Backup and Restoration? Not even Smartsheet Support or Smartsheet Customer Success Managers have mentioned that such a solution even exists.

  • marc4
    marc4 ✭✭✭✭

    If you want to back up a sheet and all the formulas you have to use the API with a command like:

    https://api.smartsheet.com/2.0/sheets/3167404810364804?include=attachments"

    where the 316... is the Sheet ID. You will get a file that has all the details. You could re-create the sheet from it.

    You can run this on a daily or hourly basis to be able to roll back changes.

    /marc

  • SKahn
    SKahn ✭✭
    edited 03/06/24

    Completely agree! My sheets are not super complicated. Still, downloading an excel version of my sheet and re-uploading it into Smartsheet would cause us to lose way too much data - check boxes and other symbols, attachments, reminders, cell history, etc. There really needs to be a way to revert to a fully-functional version of a sheet before a specific change was made.

  • SKahn
    SKahn ✭✭
    edited 05/18/24

    Agree! Please see see Smartsheet Backup and Recovery discussion.