Hi,
Apologies for the alarming title; I’m just asking for reference and risk-mitigation planning.
Suppose an entire application is accidentally deleted or something like that. Suppose also that a complete backup had been performed: workflows, Data Tables, HTML, even device-data to AWS.
What approach will give us the closest to a ‘complete recovery’? I understand we can import our application files; I’m wondering more about device data.
My understanding is that Losant will only accept device-data up to 1 month old. So, I guess my question is, should we consider this to mean: “Recovery from a worst-case scenario can only handle 1 month of history”?
On a related note, do you know if any of your clients have experimented with feeding historical data back into their system as a recovery exercise? Would you suggest ‘letting go’ of device data in a worst-case scenario, and simply recovering the application functionality?
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There’s a few questions here, so I’ll try to address each one.
Recovery on Accidental Deletion
This isn’t uncommon, so we already have a “safety delay” in place. When a device is deleted, we wait a couple of days before the underlying data is removed. This delay does not apply if you use the explicit “delete data” functionality on the device page. If you use that, the data is immediately removed.
If a parent application or organization is deleted, we wait 24 hours. We plan on increasing these delays for even better protection at some point in the future.
To recover an accidentally deleted device, you just need to contact support with the ID. We then “unmark” the device as deleted and all data re-appears in your application.
Complete Recovery
Losant maintains full backups of all historical data up to every customer’s retention limit. In the event of a catastrophic failure, these backups can completely restore the environment up to the most recent incremental backup (which occurs many times a day). Restoring these backups are not limited to the 30-day limit you experience at the user level, so data will be restored going all the way back to the retention limit.
Recovery After Safety Delay
If you find out several days later that you accidentally deleted a device, it can still be restored from our recovery backups. This is a time consuming process for our team, so charges may apply.
Feeding Historical Data
This is more common for clients coming from other platforms that want to back-fill their devices. I’ve done this myself a several occasions. Since I’m comfortable with Node.js, I have a Node script that reads sensor data from a CSV file and uses the Losant API to report the state data. We’ve got REST clients for JavaScript, Ruby, and Python. This will allow you to perform manual recoveries up to 30 days into the past.
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