What is the best way to back constituents before deleting?

Nicole San Miguel
Nicole San Miguel
Second Anniversary Name Dropper Facilitator 1 Blackbaud Certified
in Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT®: General Discussions

Hello all,

My organization recently migrated from Donor Perfect and needs to get our constituent records under our threshold limit for NXT.

My question: what would you suggest is the best way to backup these records before we delete them?

Comments

  • Alex Wong
    Alex Wong Community All-Star
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    @Nicole San Miguel
    A good way to backup records in your RE instance is to request a RE database backup (available free once a month I think). Which your tech team can potentially “load” the backup into a local instance of RE for “viewing/querying” need.

    If this isn't a good option, then export the information into CSV file using constituent query/export and then store them would be good. However, I'm going to assume those you want to “delete” are constituent record of little importance, meaning, they don't have gift and other “info” that may be important to your org. Otherwise, you will need to run other query/export (i.e. event participant, gift, etc).

  • Nicole San Miguel
    Nicole San Miguel
    Second Anniversary Name Dropper Facilitator 1 Blackbaud Certified

    @Alex Wong
    Yes, however, we have some with very old gift info. I was worried that we would need to run gift exports as well.

    Regarding potentially “loading” this info, how would we do that? Is there a KB solution?

  • Alex Wong
    Alex Wong Community All-Star
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    @Nicole San Miguel
    Depending on your org's need to retain financial info, any record that has a gift probably shouldn't be deleted. However, if you are going to delete some, then yes, you will need to run some gift query/export too.

    As for requesting a RE database backup copy, here's the KB:

    Loading a Blackbaud hosted backup locally (first time) is going to be difficult, here's a KB on it

  • Austen Brown
    Austen Brown Community All-Star
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    @Nicole San Miguel - Welcome to BB Community! For records that you are considering deleting that have giving information, I recommend moving these gift records to a general ‘anonymous’ record and recording either in a custom field/attribute or reference field the original donor's information (Name and Constituent ID). Once the back-up files are generated and the gift records are moved, proceed with the delete process.

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