Most clients don’t care logging in CiviCRM, much less the benefits of detailed logging. Until they really do.
Sometimes it’s staff or volunteers “trying to make reports cleaner” with a proverbial hammer, data being overwritten or some user mistakenly removing data.
In my case, events with participants were deleted. And to be clear, that should not happen. There is a database constraint specifically meant to prevent deleting events that have participants attached. But the WordPress Event Sync seemed to have allowed it to occur in this edge case where the event was “duplicated” in WordPress and all it’s meta data.
Why? Because the Admin and Site Enhancements (ASE) plugin had content duplication on and it is overzelaous with copying all post meta. It copied all the original CiviCRM synced events over and the client removed those events via “deleted unused events” function after changing the recurring event dates for obvious reasons.
PS: if you want to still use content duplication, this Post Duplicator is compatible with CiviCRM Event Organiser.
The key traceability was seeing deleted rows in log_civicrm_participant. Adding the events back was not the issue, it was the participant data and fees they paid.
In addition, I also use the advanced log tables extension from Greenpeace, which adds indexes for better performance and I exclude the mailing_* tables.
At this point, a restore was the right move. And we were fortunate in the timing. Many of the affected people were at a conference that week, so there wasn’t any new registrations happening in the system. That made restoring the database 20 hours prior feasible.
After the restore, detailed logging allowed me to recover a recurring membership that did occur after our restore point with a direct SQL insert into several tables.
Here’s the deal:
I had been on the fence making this optional for clients but now I now detailed logging is on every site with Civicopilot managed hosting. When something goes wrong, it’s peace of mind for them, and for me. It’s traceability and data protection.