CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I am migrating data from an ACT! database to CiviCRM. A previous data migration was done with information from notes in ACT concatenated into a single row/notes field for Civi. But now I need to redo this with changed data.

What I want to do now is re-import cleaned up data to update the information already in CiviCRM. (I cannot start over; the Civi database has been in use for a year).

What I would like to do is perform a field-by-field clean and update. For most fields, I think I can just do an import with duplicates set to update. But when I included the notes field, I ended up with a second notes row for every contact. My solution now is that I would like to blow away all the notes (this field has not been used in the live CiviCRM installation) and re-import them. I would create a spreadsheet with email address and the new notes field information, then do an import/fill.

How do I remove the existing notes from contact records? Can I (is it safe to) just go into the database and delete * from civicrm_note? I cannot find any way to manage this information from the interface and I am not going to go through 12,000 contact records to individually delete their notes.