YIKES!!! I created a report to dump all contact records. I ran the report & exported the 20,000 records to excel. I then proceeded to delete a bunch of un-used columns, including a custom Title field we created. My intent was to use the dump file to restore Title data by doing an import/contact update.
Unfortunately, I didn't check the dump report carefully. When I opened the Excel file, I noticed Contact Title was missing. I guess I inadvertently un-checked it when selecting report columns.
I was told by Salesforce the cost to restore this column would start at $10-12k. I was shocked to find out that they have no Disk backups. All of their backups are done to Tape. And, that this has only happened once before. (Am I really the only person to have ever done this?)
I'm going to see if some of our Reps are using Outlook Sync. If so, perhaps I can recover contact titles that way. Since we're fairly new to using Salesforce, I'm not sure what other recourse I have. Any ideas?????
According to Salesforce....
"Here are the steps involved in recovering data that a customer deletes:
1) Applied Engineering: Locate backup tape in co-lo facility.
2) Applied Engineering: Locate spare server in co-lo facility or ship tape to SF lab.
3) Applied Engineering: Extract tape to server (effectively recreating the entire NA1/NA0/EMEA/AP stack on the server. This step takes over 24 hours.
4) Pro Serv: Perform data export of "clean" data to flat file from restored data.
5) Pro Serv: Perform import of missing data into customer's live org.
We truly sympathize with you and the pain of losing data; however, this is time consuming work thus the $10,000 – 12,000 service cost. It’s also done by high-value employees. This is not a money making venture for us and we’ve only had to do this for one customer in the last four years.
With the release of Sandbox Edition, this alleviates the possibility of this happening for our customers. There isn’t another OnDemand vendor that can give our customers more tools to protect their data than we do."
