Have you ever found that an error in a Hubspot automation caused you to lose data and you did not know how to recover it? In this article we want to explain how to act in the event of a "disaster" and what previous steps you can take to avoid it.

HubSpot automations

Imagine, for example, that your company has three pipelines and you need to modify the closing date of all the deals that belong to one of these pipelines, leaving all the rest unchanged. The first task is to think about the best way to achieve this goal. In this case, two options may go through your head;

• Mass editing. You can filter all the deals belonging to a pipeline and modify the 'closing date' property.
• Create a workflow. In this case, Hubspot offers you interesting options that mass editing does not have, such as branching or leaving it programmed to apply to businesses that you will be creating in the future, not just the ones you already have.

In this case you opt for the second option, since you want to make a series of forks to ensure that each business is filled with the correct value.

Perfect! You have a need and you know the way to go to solve it, therefore you get to work. You enter the Hubspot Workflows tool, define the trigger, configure the branches, define the value that will be written to each property when the condition is met and finally activate it indicating that it enroll the existing businesses that meet the condition. Work done.

Once applied you go satisfied to see the results and you start to sweat. You detect that you have not only modified the dates of the deals belonging to a pipeline as you initially wanted, but that you have modified all the deals you have to Hubspot. From there the nerves take over you, and now what do I do? How do I get back to my old values?

Hubspot natively does not have the option to automatically make property backups to be able to restore the database when a disaster like the one mentioned above occurs. There is also no "unenforce the workflow" button that makes everything "go back to the way it was before", but don't suffer, Hubspot does have a solution, we'll tell you about it at the end of the article.

How to avoid errors with Hubspot workflows?

Before telling you how to restore the modified properties we want to give you a couple of tips that can help you avoid errors like the one mentioned or, if they occur, detect them quickly;

1. Use the "Test" function: This function allows you to choose any record you have for Hubspot and test how the workflow will act on it. For example, you will see if the record meets the trigger, through which branches it will pass and finally what action will be executed. We recommend that you test the workflow with different registers to verify that it really works as desired. Going back to the example from before, try a business that you know needs to be modified and also one that doesn't, in this way the test will confirm if you have done a good automation programming.
   
2. Check the data of registered businesses well: A trick that may be useful to you is to verify the number of existing deals to which the workflow will be applied, Hubspot informs you of this number when it asks you if you want to register records that are already in the database data. Going back to the initial example, imagine that you want to modify 50 businesses and that when you go to register the existing ones, Hubspot informs you that it will register 150. This difference should set you off an alarm, it is telling you that the trigger is not programmed correctly. Go back to the starting point and check it well before executing.
   
3. Track the Workflow: The workflow tool has a tab called "History". Tracking the history during the hours or days after the workflow is activated will help you see how it is performing and if it is running as expected. It is important to note that the sooner you detect the error, the easier and faster it will be to recover the modified data.
   
   

   
   
   

How to recover data in case of disaster?

Now you will be thinking, yes, yes, very well, it is interesting to know these options, I will apply them in the future, but what now? How do I retrieve the closing dates that have been modified by mistake?

To do this you have to go to the Hubspot properties, within the configuration section, once there you have to look for the property modified by mistake, in this case the business closing date and hover the mouse over the property. You will see that three buttons appear, if you go to the third, a list of options will be displayed, one of them is "export property history", this is the one that interests us.

This functionality will export a file in which you can see in columns the last values ​​of the property for each record and the date they were modified. From here the work consists of taking the last value before the modification and putting everything in the column of "closing date". Once done, you can import the file again with the correct dates.

It may seem complicated, but we encourage you to try to follow this procedure even if you don't need to retrieve any data now, it can be a good workout in case you ever have to do it.

Finally, just to tell you that at Digitalmakers we are experts in Hubspot's CRM. You can contact us whenever you need and we will help you solve these and other situations.