Lost data in Business Central’s production environment while adding new app file

Few days back, we encountered a very difficult situation with one of customer’s database. In production environment, a technical who was new to uploading a new application in the business central application management. While uninstalling the older app, he wrongly opted to delete the custom table data. Instead of creating a new version, he uninstalled old app file with deletion of data in custom fields and tables.

After the data is deleted the whole team went here and there to get the lost data. The we found that as an administrator, we can anyway restore an environment perfectly from a time in the past however the data base back up can restored within the retention period applied to the production environments. This is also available for sandbox environment.

We used the backup management of business central and restored the database from the time the last update was made by that technical. We got the database back with the lost data in custom fields and tables thanks to database backups of business central which is an essential part of any business continuity and disaster recovery strategy. It protected our data from deletion.

Business Central on cloud version uses Azure SQL Database as database backup technology. All databases are well protected by automated backups that are continuously created and maintained by the Azure SQL service.

This is somewhat saved us from the customer escalations and huge loss for the customer data.

To restore an environment, you'll have to provide a name for the environment and a date/time from which to restore the database.

1. Select Environments and then open the environment you want to restore.

2. Select Restore.

3. In the Restore Environment pane, specify the date and time in the past to which you want to restore the environment.

4. Select the type to be used for the restored environment.

5. Specify a name for the restored environment.

6. Select Restore.When the process starts, you can go to the list of your environments and see the status of the restored environment. At first, you'll see the new environment with state Preparing. The original environment state remains as Active. The restore operation duration is affected by several factors. For large or highly active databases, the restore might take several hours

7. Once the restore is completed, the environment state will change to Active. If the restore operation fails, you can find the failure details on the Operations page. In this case, delete the failed environment, and then try to restore again. Contact Microsoft Support if the issue persists