Does one funky record mean you have to restore/backup entire RE hosted database?

Dianna Heim · March 2018

We are Blackbaud hosted. We have one record in RE7 which causes an error on a number of our work station computers when we try to open it. The issue is with the constituent's Notes tab. Blackbaud is telling our admin that they have to do a restore or backup of the RE database to analyze and possibly correct this one error. As we are also NXT-Analyze and Research Point customers (and we competed a wealth screening last year), we are concerned about what this will do to our records in NXT and RP, including all the screenings, lists, Research Lists, etc. Is there no other work around for this? Has anyone else been given a recommendation by Blackbaud to do same? Thank you.

Steven Cinquegrana 2 · March 2018

Hi Dianna,

Not meaning to contradict the Blackbaud powers-that-be, but a full restore sounds a bit extreme to me. And how would you know when to restore from? You might have discovered the errant Note today, but what if it had been entered a week/month/year ago? Obviously, you can't restore a six month-old backup over the top of your current data without huge consequences.

Personally, I'd be inclined to request that a Blackbaud back-end guru have look at the raw table data to determine the cause and, hopefully, "massage" the record back to health without taking "the nuclear option".

In the past with RE7, I recall that Notes would sometimes seemingly get corrupted due to content being pasted directly from MS Word or Outlook, usually due to a control character or whatever being included. (As a self-hosted customer, we could add an On-Save event handler via a Macro to parse the content and filter out the nasty stuff before it hit the back-end; that option isn't available when hosted, unfortunately.)

Anyway, I'd be making that request and see what happens. Good luck. Let us know how you fare.

Update

Dianna, you mention that the problem occurs "on a number of our work station computers". Does this imply that it doesn't occur on at least one other? If so, are you able to edit and re-save the Note and resolve the issue that way? I'm guessing that if this were possible that you'd have already tried it, but just in case. And have you tried opening the record with the Supervisor login?

Cheers,

Steve Cinquegrana | CEO and Principal Developer | Protégé Solutions

Jen Claudy · March 2018

I'm with Steve...this seems extreme, and not really helpful. Especially considering that with NXT, BB has said the hope is that restoring a backup is an extraordinarily rare event moving forward. I would get a second opinion.

Ryan Hyde · March 2018

Can you successfully query for this one constituent without it causing problems? If yes, then a better solution may be exporting every scrap of information from the record (including notes if possible), and then reconstructing the record from the data you pulled out, being sure to comb over any notes that exist to get rid of any odd characters. Once comleted, you could delete the screwed up record (globally delete constituents and pipe in the query that looks for just that one record) and then reassign her constituent ID number so that it matches the old one, if that matters to you at all.

I'm not sure this will work at all - just a thought.

Does one funky record mean you have to restore/backup entire RE hosted database?

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