How to recover deleted records in Dynamics CRM 2011 on premises

Question

We are setting up our Dynamics CRM 2011 on premises environment and we are interested to know what kind of recovery capabilities exist in Dynamics CRM so we can plan ahead.

We are going to have full weekly backups and differential daily backups but what if someone accidentally deletes records at 9PM and our last differential backup was at 1 PM – data is obviously not going to be in the backup.

Previous versions of Dynamics CRM had soft delete so it was easy to undelete records but this has changed with 2011 version.

Any info would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

There are several things you can do to prevent loss of data or recover data if it gets deleted.

Enable auditing for the most important records – even if data is deleted you should be still able to recover using database audit data and SKD. Check this article for more details.

Review user permissions – see if you can reduce user privileges so that only admins can delete records.

Make more frequent differential database backups - see if you can create differential backups every hour or so.

Use third party tools – check out ApexSQL Recover and ApexSQL Log . These tools claim they can recover deleted data by reading transaction log.

Answer 2

The approach depends on what kind of harm you're expecting to experience.

• Carelessness - enabled auditing
• Legal consideration - external web service
• Maliciousness - security roles
• Malfunction - scheduled backups