17 March, 2022

Undo or not undo: screw-ups you can revert or will regret about

Explaining the possibilities to protect and restore important data as well as warnings about points of no return.

Flespi is a backend platform. This means you entrust us your data and we do our best to provide instant and uninterrupted access to this data. We do our best to implement protection mechanisms and tools to minimize the chance of accidental loss of data.

However, some operations cannot be easily undone. In this article we will talk about different cases in which deleted instances can be restored, cannot be restored, and which preventive measures can be taken to avoid irrevocable consequences.

See the list of deleted items

If you want to see the list of recently deleted flespi items (channels, devices, streams, calculators, etc.), you can find them in Toolbox until the logs for these items are deleted from the platform (in 30 days or when the logs rotate upon reaching the 3GB limit).

Open Toolbox -> expand the list of devices -> find See deleted at the bottom:

flespi devices deleted items

Unfortunately, restoring the deleted devices automatically is not possible. You can manually re-create the device taking its ident from the logs.

Download device messages backup

Snapshots save the messages stored in the flespi devices every 24 hours. So, in case device messages get deleted on the flespi platform (after messages TTL expires or manually), you will have a chance to download them and push to the platform via a script (which is not very convenient and should be used as an ultimate measure).

With snapshots, you can get access to device data for the last 10 days maximum. We backup containers since they store devices messages and can carry up to 10GB of precious data. Learn more about snapshots in our dedicated article.

Note: You cannot force flespi to create a snapshot upon request — the backup system picks the moment to make a snapshot automatically.

You can find the snapshots for each specific device in the Snapshots tab on the device card:

flespi snapshots download

The API allows you to get the list of snapshots for a specific device and to download the specific snapshot.

Prevent accidental items deletion 

To prevent (at least partly) the unwanted deletion, you want to configure the ACL token in such a way that only a limited number of authorized users can perform it.

Here’s how to do that for devices:

flespi create acl token

Note: similar config may be used to prevent deletion of other critical flespi items, e.g. channels, streams, calculators, etc.

Another note: you will not be able to access the flespi panel with an ACL token (only Master tokens allow this).

Restore items config

This one is not so critical, but can still cause troubles and inconveniences. If the item configuration was somehow changed in an incorrect way, you can go back in time to one of the previous configuration “snapshots”.

When on the item Edit tab, find the Wayback button with the clock on it in the bottom right corner of the screen and select the previous state to go back to. 

flespi device configuration wayback

Note: this feature works for all flespi items (channels, devices, streams, calcs, etc.) that are modified via a respective PUT request (see our API).

***

We described some of the ways in which you can protect your account from accidental or unwanted losses. If you have any other cases where we can get you covered, let us know.