Today I experienced what appears to have been a major Smartsheet malfunction that caused significant data loss on an active project tracker.
After accessing the sheet through the iOS mobile app, I later discovered that dozens of items had been rearranged, row hierarchy had been changed repeatedly, conditional-formatting rules had been removed, rows had been deleted, and approximately 30 attachments were deleted.
The Activity Log shows a concentrated destructive event over only a few minutes, including:
At least 179 hierarchy changes
16 row-reorder events
12 deleted rows
30 deleted attachments
Nine conditional-formatting rules being unapplied
At the same exact timestamp, Smartsheet recorded all 30 attachment deletions, the 12-row deletion, and removal of the conditional formatting. This does not look like normal individual editing.
I have submitted a Support case and requested that this be escalated as a data-loss incident. Hopefully Smartsheet can recover the sheet and attachments from its backend, because manually reconstructing everything that was lost is not realistic.
My larger concern is the lack of a proper sheet-level revision history. Smartsheet provides an Activity Log, snapshots, backups, and limited cell history, but there does not appear to be a straightforward way to open the complete sheet as it existed at an earlier time and restore that version.
Platforms such as Google Sheets and Bluebeam Revu provide usable version or revision history. A project-management platform that stores schedules, attachments, procurement records, and other critical project information should provide the same basic protection.
Users should be able to:
View complete historical versions of a sheet.
Restore or duplicate the sheet from a selected timestamp.
Recover deleted attachments.
Retain conditional formatting, formulas, workflows, hierarchy, and other sheet configuration during restoration.
Clearly identify which device or application session generated each change.
Until this is resolved, I will no longer use the Smartsheet mobile app and will be scheduling recurring backups for every active project. However, periodic manual backups should not be the only protection against a large accidental deletion or application malfunction.
Has anyone experienced a similar bulk-change or attachment-deletion event, particularly after using the mobile app? Was Smartsheet Support able to perform a server-side restoration?
