Blog posts
Product Updates
Product Updates
Introducing: Beacon Time Machine
David Simpson
November 13, 2024
We've been making significant upgrades to our infrastructure to make querying Beacon faster and more scalable. Our new infrastructure makes some exciting new features possible, and Time Machine is the first of these that we're making available.
This is really useful if you realise that you've made a mistake in Beacon - even a big mistake!
Accidentally deleted some Organisations yesterday and need to get them back? Use Time Machine to download all of your Organisations as they were yesterday morning.
Made a mistake in an import and overwritten an important field on every Person record? Time Machine will let you download all People records as they were an hour ago and you can run another import to fix everything.
With Time Machine you have a mechanism to quickly and easily access the state of your data at any point in the past week. You can then choose exactly how you make use of this data and fix exactly the records that you need to fix - you don't have to revert your entire database to a previous state and lose lots of data in the process.
Beacon Time Machine is made possible by the investment that we are making into our infrastructure.
We have recently made significant upgrades to Beacon's systems, including the introduction of a new data warehouse that is synced to our main databases. It's this investment in our data infrastructure that means, as you may have already noticed, that Beacon exports are now significantly faster. For example, it's now possible to export 10 million payment records in around 20 seconds.
As a product team we're working hard to make sure that our infrastructure is built on the latest technologies and that we're giving you useful tools that this approach makes possible.
Can everyone use Time Machine?
Time Machine can only be used by Beacon admins.
Can we go back further than 7 days?
No, not right now! 7 days is the furthest back you can go with Time Machine, but all Beacon data is backed up for 30 days in case of emergencies.
Can't we just have an undo button for imports?
It's the absolute dream - but it's really hard to build and to get working perfectly. Time Machine gives you the data you need to fix things, but for now you're going to have to run your own import to restore your database to the state you want it.
Can we use filters or apply a template to the Time Machine export?
Not yet, for now you'll get all records of the type that you specify. This is something that we're considering for future improvements to Time Machine.
Beacon Time Machine is a new option that you'll find in your sidebar under the Export Data section. Log in to Beacon and take it for a spin!
