Changed List Field data lost

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I changed the list items in a field thinking it was specific to the project and it changed it for all projects erasing the data that was in those fields. is there a way for me to get a backup of a page with all those entities with the field correctly filled out? i have changed it back but it is already wiped from the fields. i missed the “window” for undoing the change

any help would be greatly appreciated

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Hi @JKno,

Welcome to the community! Though sorry to hear you’re having trouble. Depending on the scale of the data you need to fix, your choices involve either making bulk changes on the web, or writing an API script to fix the changes for you.

I myself made a similar mistake with a status field in the past, wiping out a bunch of statuses in the process. I wrote this API script to fix the change which you could use as a starting point to reset values for your List field.

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@JKno - After doing a few tests to try and reproduce the behavior you described, I was able to confirm the following things:

  1. Removing an option from a List field will leave all instances of that existing value in place/unchanged.
  2. When removing options from a Status List type field, if any of the statuses you are removing are currently in use you’ll get a warning message listing the number of records currently using it before confirming its removal.

Can you confirm the steps you took that incurred data loss for you? It appears appropriate safeguards are in place to prevent something like you described from happening, but it’s always possible you discovered some edge case.

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Hi Brandon,

I believe what happened is in another project I wiped out the list field contents and put in a new list.

then having a second thought about it went to check an older still going much larger project and that whole field was blank.

so then I tried to undo the process by changing the list contents to be what it was before, but that did not work either. In the end I had an export with 95% of that data filled in so I was able to batch import to update the entities with that. however whenever i check the field history it doesn’t even show that it was edited this year. which i thought was really odd. so maybe something else happened??

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Very odd, indeed. Those sound like the same steps I took while trying to reproduce. List fields are, at the database level, just a Text column with a finite set of options presented that it can be set to in the web UI. When those list options change, none of the stored data is touched, just the list of options changes.

Should it happen again, please open a support ticket with your exact steps you took so we can investigate further.