Data disappearing/lost

[jason370]

Hi,

We've been using Sugar Community Edition for about 2 months. We started with a fresh install of 5.0.0 and have not upgraded; running on Linux with MySQL.

Recently users have been complaining about data that just disappears. In one case when creating a Contact the user entered the email address, first name, last name, and phone number and saved it. When they came back the next day the email address wasn't in the record but the other fields were. The email address was nowhere in the database (checked via mysqldump), so it wasn't just a case of the record not being associated correctly. Other users report the same thing with the contacts Notes field.

Another user reported that they entered a dozen Accounts yesterday and now they look today and the records are completely gone. We're not doing anything special with the database that would cause records to be deleted.

One thought I had was that it might be caused by cron jobs, which I recently enabled. But the only cron jobs that are active relate to inbound emails and campaigns, the prune cron jobs are listed as inactive:

Prune User History Table on 1st of Month Inactive
Check Inbound Mailboxes Active
Run Nightly Process Bounced Campaign Emails Active
Run Nightly Mass Email Campaigns Active
Prune Database on 1st of Month Inactive

Any ideas?

[Markku]

Hi jason370,

Sugar application does not change or delete any data by itself.

Moreover when you delete records in SugarCRM, those records will remain in database, only flagged as deleted so you should find them from sqldump. Only way to delete records completely from Sugar db is to access database directly with a tool like phpMyAdmin or similar.

Maybe someone you don't know has access to your system? Are you on shared server of do you run Sugar on your own intranet?

I'd suggest you to change MySQL root user password and SugarCRM database user name and/or password first. You could also change user passwords and limit IP addresses that can access your system with .htaccess file.

Do you perhaps have several SugarCRM installations (like test installations) so that users can by mistake use different versions? Do you have third party modules installed?

It might be difficult to find out how and by whom records were deleted but I'm confident applicaton itself is not to blame.

[paulgigliotti]

I agree that Sugar doesn't just delete items, but different users experience different levels of Suger...functinality. I'm the "admin" for Suugar in my office, and often times people will contact me stating that certina informatin isn't availavle to them. I'll look under my log in, or even a 3rd party regular (non-admin) user's account and sure enough it's there. Then we'll go back in the first person's id and...it's not there.

sometimes itmes under the basic and advanced searches dissapear for a while, then return. There seem to be quite a few quirts to the program. Any ideas of how to minimalize this?

thanks

Paul

[DragonflyMaster]

Hi,
I'm not 100% sure that your problem is due to some kind of failure of Sugar application or to someone that nightly deletes data from your database.
Sometimes issues aren't technical, but depending on how users behave within the application: are you sure that they actually filled those fields correctly?
Furthermore, sometimes on a web-based app users move back to previous pages using the "back" arrow in the browser: this way most of data present in the web page might not be saved or validated correctly.
My suggestion is: try the app yourself through a test user and see if you can replicate these issues.
Cheers

[jason370]

I just wanted to follow up on this. The dozen accounts that were entered and said to be lost were actually not. That one was probably user error. The disappearing Notes on contacts happened for multiple people over days or weeks, so I don't think that was user error. There was no chance of outside database access interfering and I think the cron jobs were not to blame. So the data loss was less pronounced than I originally thought, but still there were issues with Notes and email addresses on contacts either being lost after being entered, or not being stored correctly when being added, most likely beyond just user error.