Best way to recover deleted records?

[Joey Wan Kenobi]

We had been purging old records (tickets) from our instance using a custom job. Now... we need to recover a bunch of them (numbering in 1-2 million range).

As far as I can tell, we have the following options:

1. Undelete Records from the sys_audit_delete table

2. Export the old records from subprod and import into prod

Does anyone have experience with restoring this volume of tickets that can lend some advice? Here are some of my concerns with using either of the above mentioned approaches:

A. Unintended effects - Business rules being triggered, Emails being sent, Approvals being created, Integrations triggered

(Again we are talking about old tickets, so none of this should happen)

B. Ticket health - Attachments, approvals and workflow contexts weren't explicitly deleted by the job, so will they be back in place? 

I will be doing some experimentation with this, but I am looking for a word from anyone who experienced this

[Amit Gujarathi]

Hi @Joey Wan Kenobi ,
I trust you are doing great.

Restoring a large volume of tickets can be a challenging task, but I can provide you with some advice on the options you mentioned.

Option 1: Undelete Records from the sys_audit_delete table To recover the tickets, you can consider undeleting the records from the sys_audit_delete table. This table keeps track of deleted records and can be used to restore them. However, there are a few concerns to keep in mind:

A. Unintended effects: Since you're dealing with old tickets, the chances of unintended effects like business rules being triggered, emails being sent, approvals being created, or integrations being triggered are minimal. However, it's still advisable to perform a thorough analysis before proceeding.

B. Ticket health: While the custom job might not have explicitly deleted attachments, approvals, or workflow contexts, it's important to verify if these components will be restored along with the tickets. You can test this by restoring a sample ticket and checking if the attachments, approvals, and workflow contexts are correctly reinstated.

Option 2: Export old records from subprod and import into prod Another approach is to export the old records from a subproduction instance and import them into the production instance. This method allows you to bring back the tickets in bulk. Similar concerns arise here:

A. Unintended effects: As with option 1, the possibility of unintended effects should be minimal since these are old tickets. Nonetheless, it's prudent to assess the impact before executing the import process.

B. Ticket health: When exporting and importing records, it's crucial to ensure that attachments, approvals, and workflow contexts associated with the tickets are preserved. Verify if the export process captures all the necessary data and if the import process correctly restores these components.

In either case, I recommend performing thorough testing and validation before attempting to restore the entire volume of tickets. You can start by restoring a subset of tickets and verifying their integrity, attachments, approvals, and workflow contexts.

[Joey Wan Kenobi]

Anyone else have experience with this?