CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Warning:  If you delete the contact who created a custom data group, you can lose access to the custom data.

To protect yourself against this risk, upon creating custom data groups, visit the table civicrm_custom_group through phpmyAdmin and set the value of created-id to null for your new group.

It seems that the field created-id on the table civicrm_custom_group is set to the value of the logged in contact creating the custom_group.

This is logical enough, but if that contact is deleted, civicrm_custom_group records are deleted and this cascades to delete the associated fields in civicrm_custom_field.

The actual custom data tables are not deleted, but the recovery would require some careful data surgery to recreate the entries in custom_group and custom_field to point to the data so that civicrm can see it if a good backup were not available.

Instead of deleting the civicrm_custom_group record, the field created-id should be set to a null value on deletion of the contact.  I have reported this as a bug issue.

Note that the merge duplicate function also mishandles this case.

For tracking purpose: http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-5451

Also, issue filed to improve behavior for merge (scheduled for 3.2): http://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-5455

Kurund

I just got burned by this same behavior.  Deleted an Individual contact I had used for configuring a client site and suddenly my Custom Data Groups are all gone - that's incredibly frustrating and there was no warning - *sigh* - guess I'll recreate and then take Will's advice and set created-id to null on the recreated data groups.