Can NXT be used completely in the cloud?

Jane Van Ingen

Can NXT be used completely in the cloud? I ask because we are considering moving from RE7 to NXT, but have seen two community discussions that are concerning:
If a hosted RE7 client has to restore to backup, there is a loss of NXT specific data
https://community.blackbaud.com/forums/viewtopic/143/37410?post_id=199415#p199415
database back up and restore
https://community.blackbaud.com/forums/viewtopic/143/38971

It seems to me that if NXT could be used completely in the cloud and backed-up in the cloud, the aforementioned problems could be avoided.


Thanks for any information.


Sincerely,

Jane

Keri Barnhart

Hi Jane Van Ingen‍ - NXT can only partially be used in the cloud.  When talking about RENXT, it is ALSO RE7. It's the same database data for the most part, there's just two ways to view it. RE7 is the more traditional database view while NXT is the web-page access point. However, some data originates in NXT and does not have a presence in the traditional database view of RE7: new attachments, certain fields, NXT lists, etc. These things are the ones that are "lost" in a data restoration.


The NXT-original data is saved in a different location and in a different way than the both-views data. Anything that can be accessed or created in the traditional RE7 view of the database can be restored more easily than things created for NXT and not available in RE7, per Blackbaud explanations in the threads/KB articles you have seen. Because of the added complication of restoring the NXT-only data, we have the added caveats and "data may be lost" warnings.


They can restore NXT data, it's just not as likely to happen without some catastrophic error and possibly extra payment.


Cloud vs non-cloud backups isn't really part of the problem. I mean, it may be (if NXT data is all cloud-based), but it might just be that the way the two parts are stored and linked is the issue, and if both parts were stored in the cloud, we'd still see the problem.