Recover your deleted CRM data and recreate them using CRM API

I found this outstanding article today on how to recover accidentally deleted CRM entity data in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 !

Uma Anbazhagan writes:

Have you ever lost some your business records in Microsoft Dynamics CRM by accidently deleting them? Are you wondering how to recover them re-create them in CRM, without having to go through much of the tedious manual efforts.

Prior to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, we used the “soft-delete” method, where when someone deleted a record, the record will not be actually deleted from the database immediately. Instead the record would be internally marked with IsDeleted = true, and there will be a CRM Deletion Service which will run an Asynchronous System Job once a day, which would actually pick up the records marked with IsDeleted = true and actually delete them from the database. So you could have used workarounds to recover the recently deleted data if it had not yet been deleted by the Deletion Service.

With CRM 2011, there are no more soft deletes in CRM, the record is actually deleted from the database right away. So, this becomes important than ever before. But CRM has the very powerful “Auditing” capability. Provided, you had Auditing turned on for those records, you can look at the Audit logs and find out all the changes that happened on your record including the deletion.

For the rest of this article and the code to actually perform the recoveries you need to check out this blog entry at:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/crm/archive/2011/05/23/recover-your-deleted-crm-data-and-recreate-them-using-crm-api.aspx

I hope this helps!

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