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Can a deleted user be restored?

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Level 2

Hi

Somehow we managed to delete a user by accident. Is there a way of recovering that?

Many thanks

Allan

5 Replies

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Community Advisor

Ouch. That is unfortunate Allan,

Although under Setup > Recycle Bin it is possible to recover recently deleted Projects, Tasks, Issues, Documents, and Templates, there is no such option for Users. I suggest you phone the help desk immediately to see if Workfront can offer any Database Administrator support....but suspect the answer is no.

On the (faintly) silver lining side...

As in life, the work the disappeared user performed remains, so I would recommend you back up that connection from another Workfront environment asap. If you have a customer refreshable SB01, SB02 (or hurry, and use preview before it is refreshed this weekend), you. Depending on the importance of the user and volume of related work, you could either write reports to identify the users ownership and involvement (eg exporting them to Excel), or if warranted, use our Workfront Snapshot solution to “just grab everything today” and then deal with it later.

Regards,

Doug

Thank you for getting back to me, I am not even sure how it happened the audit log suggests that I deleted it but I only deleted another one. I am not sure what we have in terms of SB. Do you know if the hours they logged with remain but with blank user. I could then create a new account and ask them to link their username with those hours Allan Ruan Head of Digital NEL allan.ruan@nhs.net‚ÄØ Mobile/07818510289 ‚ÄØ 1 Lower Marsh, First floor‚ÄØ Waterloo, Town/London SE1 7NT‚ÄØ ‚ÄØ‚ÄØ www.nelcsu.nhs.uk<>‚ÄØ @NELCSU<>‚ÄØ LinkedIn<>‚ÄØ

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Community Advisor

Hmm...good question, Allan,

I'm loathe to delete a user to find out, but since Owner is part of the primary key on an Hour, suspect that any hours will be deleted. All the more reason to grab that backup while you can, one way or another, so you can then reinstate the hours via Kickstart or our Excel Updater solution.

Our time zones (currently 7pm London, noon Calgary) are working against us a bit, but if you're still at it, and would like some company, I'm at doug.denhoed@atappstore.com and would be happy to jump on a Zoom within the next hour to help triage...

Regards,

Doug

Thank you so much for your advise. I ran a report and it showed the hours logged but without an owner which meant the impact wasnt as bad as I thought. It was easier to create a new account add them to the right group and they can log time again. Note to self deleting users is dangerous. The Excel Updater solution sounds interesting though, is there a training article you could point me to?

Thank you again for your help

Allan

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Community Advisor

My pleasure Allan,

Indeed: you might consider removing the ability to delete users from each access level just to prompt the Let’s Think Carefully First thought.

I am pleased to hear that (as with the other objects I expected) the Hours entered were preserved after the user was deleted; albeit “orphaned”.

As you’ve now recreated a new User, yes, rather than having to reenter them manually and delete the orphans, Excel Updater could save you some time:

  • export the IDs of those Hours in question to Excel
  • rename the second details tab to HOURS
  • adding a second column for ownerID
  • populating every row of the latter with the ID of the new user, and then
  • uploading that file via Excel to update all such Hours “back” to the correct User all at once

I you need any further assistance with it, you’re welcome to email me directly at doug.denhoed@atappstore.com

Regards,

Doug