Recovering Old Change information to a current profile

Gerry Mitchell

Is there a (easy) way to recover old change information that got buried in a merge?

In May, 2021 a user created a profile GZ6T-YPC and then merged it with an existing profile LH5T-VLN that had apparently been imported in 2012. They merged the older profile into the newer surviving profile, so all the change information from 2012 to 2021 disappeared from the current profile.

Can the old change information be recovered into the current profile? It would seem that restoring the old profile and then merging the new profile into the old profile could result in a mess that might require a lot of work to clean up.

Gerry Mitchell

Gordon, thank you for your thoughtful response - you outlined a good thought process for deciding how to proceed.

Gordon Collett

No, the only way to get the older change log is to restore the older record then remerge in the opposite direction. Depending on the number of changes since the merge, this may be pretty simple to do.

However, first you would want to thoroughly evaluate the older change log and see if there is anything of value in it. If the two profiles really are for the same person and all the current information on the profile is correct, there really may not be anything you need. And if anyone really wants to see it, they can always just go to the the change log of the current profile, find the merge, go to the archived profile, and look at the change log there. It isn't gone, just less convenient.

Also, make sure there isn't some good reason for that older change log to be nicely hidden away. I've worked on some profiles whose change log is such a mess due to repeated incorrect editing, corrections of information, bad merges, restored merges, changing to a different person, changing back to the original person and more, that the only way to really restore the original person was to recreate the original profile, put on the best information, then merge the older one into the newer one to purposely hide the confusing mess in the other change log.

When things are not quite that bad, I'll create a custom fact that states "Everything before this entry in the change log should be ignored. It has been thoroughly evaluated and all problems in it and on the profile have been corrected" then include an explanation of what I have done. I then delete the custom fact which creates a permanent post in the change log for that declaration.