As you may know, when you delete a contact record in GoldMine, it is deleted from the database and can not be “undeleted”. The only way to recover a deleted contact record in GoldMine is to restore it from a backup. This is why it’s so important to ensure you have a good backup plan in place.
Restoring the deleted contact record(s) from the backup is a fairly straight forward process and something First Direct Corp. can assist you with. However, I’ve run into a few situations where the customer has discovered that a contact record has been deleted, but they are not sure when it was deleted. It could have been deleted days or even weeks before. This can make recovering the deleted record much more challenging or even impossible if the customer does not have a backup of the database that goes back far enough in time to when the record still existed. For example, if the record was deleted 2 weeks ago, but you only have 1 weeks worth of backups available, then the record won’t exist in any of the backups that you have.
So what are you to do? You could try keeping/saving more copies of the backups or even using a cloud storage/backup service, which will usually keep 1 months worth of your backups/files for you. Another alternative is to use a SQL Trigger to notify you via an email when a contact record is deleted. You can even include in the email the name of the GoldMine user that deleted the contact record, allowing you to contact that user and confirm their desire to delete the record. If it was done by mistake/accident, then you can immediately start to work on recovering the record from the previous nights backup.
SQL Triggers can also be used to notify you when a particular fields value has changed. GoldMine has a feature that allows you to record changes that are made to a fields value in the history tab of the contact record, however, it does not alert you or make you aware of these changes as they happen. This is where a SQL Trigger could come in very handy.
If you are interested in learning more about how to setup a SQL Trigger to notify you immediately when a contact record is deleted or if a field is edited/updated please contact First Direct Corp. or call us at (800) 935-4386.
