The pasTransfer Mappings module in pasPortal has some exciting new disaster recovery capabilities.

Every now and again our help desk gets a panicked support ticket where a user has accidentally deleted or overwritten data from an exisitng mapping sheet and broken an integration.  In the past this would result in a ticket to our IT and development teams to attempt to restore the data from some past date when it was assumed that the data was good.  Now, there are all sorts of problems with this approach.  Database backups are not maintained indefinitely and if a mistake is not caught fairly soon the data can be lost forever.  The user may not know exactly when the data had changed and therefore not be able to tell us when to restore to.  The list goes on.  That all changes now.  Users can now view backups of their data and restore previous versions of mapping data without technical assistance from the support desk.

Automatic Backup

Every time a user checks in a change to a pasTransfer Mapping or Lookup the previous version of the data will automatically be backed up.  This happens regardless of where you are making the change from whether it is via the pasPortal Mapping Editor or the Excel-based pasFusion addin or even from within pasTransfer itself.

Manual Restore

End-user with edit permissions on a mapping or lookup sheet are able to view the backup history from the pasTransfer Mappings module by clicking the backups icon next to the mapping sheet name.  From there they are presented with a chronological list of previous iterations of the mapping/lookup data along with the date when it had been created and the name of the person who created the mapping/lookup.  From here they can press the restore button next to the backup set and the portal will immediately check out the mapping to the current user and copy the backup mapping data into the edit for the end-user to review.  After they review the restored data and determine that it is what they want they can then check it back in which will both trigger a backup of the current data and make the new data active and available to integrations.  If the data they see is incorrect they can go back and restore a different backup set or just roll back the check out like it never even happened.