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Billy_C
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Backups what is being backed up and how frequently

Hi there,

 

So I had a discussion internally about how safe the Powerapps system is en what we need to do in order to make it secure.

I know that system backups are being made, the only thing is that I would like to know how frequently are these backups and what is being backed up? Is it backing up every day, once a week etc. and is this only the data itself (records), or are custom tables, views and forms, business rules, connectors, business process process flows and other flows also being backed up aswell?

 

The reason I am asking this is because I want to know in case it's only data what we would need to about the rest do we need to manually take backups of our solutions and flows, or do you propose to use other third party tools to manage this?

 

Thanks in advance,

 

Billy Cottrell

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Billy_C
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Hi @RusselThomas,

 

Sure no problem you are welcome, I don't know about the canvas apps as I haven't made one in that environment, but I guess that's possible. Nonetheless, I can easily back up flows by just exporting them as a .zip file which is fine by me, I mean there aren't a lot of flows that aren't able to be placed inside solutions anyway, so I guess that's fine.

I do have to say that I have never heard of the COE toolkit before, so I have no knowledge about it, but definitely could be interesting if it's still possible to use it.

 

The only thing that does worry me is how you can reconstruct the lost data without altering any of the build-in fields. Let me explain what I mean with that:

 

Let's say you start in the morning, and you notice that a certain amount of data is gone and other people didn't notice it but already changed/created records. Usually you ask to restore a back-up because data is gone and what they would do is try to find which back-up is the last back-up that still has the data, and then they would import it into the separate environment. Except there is one issue the data that the users have changed or created afterwards is now missing, so how would you restore that data because it already has relations and such, connected that don't yet exist in that back up? In my case for example I have relations set as required in order to make sure that they will be filled in as well as flows listening to these relations to update the records correspondingly. Having to update all of this inside a managed solution isn't really easy to do and might even take a really long time before everything is fixed.

 

Is there any advisable process to restore changed/created data from after the restored back up?

 

Thanks in advance,

 

Billy Cottrell

RusselThomas
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Hi @Billy_C ,

Moving well beyond my realm of expertise here, pretty sure a D365 admin could answer this, but I'll share my perspective;

Usually granularity is provided by incremental backups - you recover from your full, then apply your incrementals to get to a lower granularity recovery state - but at some point you're still going to sit with a delta in both the positive and the negative based on changes that were made intra-backup.

It might be possible to use stuff like transaction logging to figure out which changes you want to reintroduce, but stitching data back together in the backend is always tricky - you've got two tiers of business and data logic you're potentially missing, so it's easy to miss relationships and create orphaned records.

I can't really say I can think of any method to achieve this - more than happy to be proven wrong though!

 

COE Toolkit - Still very current, and I see the archive solution is still included.

 

Kind regards,

RT

Billy_C
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Hi @RusselThomas,

 

My apologies for the questions it's not my expertise either as I am more of a frontend guy who likes to fiddle with backend stuff as well (but less), but your perspective brought me some ideas to perhaps propose a method to counter such issues. Usually when you import a backup for the first time in an environment you erase its data, so you can start clean. As you said you can apply those incremental backups to get to a lower granularity state.

 

Now what if you could then import your most recent backup and add a setting to the import pane, so you can disable the deletion of all records, so you won't lose those lost records. This way the only issue you could have is duplicate records which you could solve by checking whether the first one was deleted or not if so delete that record and keep the most recent one. Perhaps even set the duplicate records aside, show the differences and ask which one the user wants to keep.

 

Of course, I know it's probably not easy to implement such a thing if it's even possible. In case it's possible it could remove the possibility to lose data and increase the efficiency of using backups. I guess one could call this merging backups I guess, since it's a bit like merging branches in GitHub except you disable the deletion part.

 

Anyways this is not possible now, so I guess I'll just have to take the time to correct the data, disable the flows and business rules and hope that everything else is okay.

 

Kind regards,

 

Billy Cottrell

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