Missing contact records

Question

I am missing two contact records. I have done an advanced search in trash and they are not there. I have their information saved elsewhere (a spreadsheet, an email update from a webform) so I can recreate their records.

What concerns me, though, is that they were lost. The only reason they came to my attention is they belong to a particular student group that I needed to contact. This is a pretty small subset of our overall membership, so it was easy to identify that there were missing records. My concern now is that there might be more missing contact records, but I don't know how to look for them or even how they would go missing. Any ideas?

Answer 1

As far as I know if you did not have the extended logging switched on, if they were permanently deleted there is no direct way to check.

You might want to compare a backup with the current data, if that is possible?

To reassure you: we work with a fair number of organizations that use CiviCRM, some small and some quite large. None of them have ever experienced contacts simply 'disappearing' from the database.

Answer 2

If you have logging on, then the contact will be added to that log when it is created or modified.

When they are Deleted Permanently those record remain in Logging.

Therefore you can do a search in log_civicrm_contact for log_action = Delete. Then you can look at the log_date and log_conn_id and work out who did it and when, and you can extract that info and recreate the contact.