How to recover previous version of the overwritten SAS data set?

[paulinalawson]

Hi,

One of our user accidentally overwrote the original dataset. Could anyone please tell me how to recover previous version of the dataset?

I appreciate the help.

Regards,

Paulina

[paulinalawson]

One of our user accidentally overwrote the original dataset. Could anyone please tell me how to recover previous version of the dataset?

I appreciate the help.

Regards,

Paulina

[Reeza]

Are you on Windows or Unix? SAS Server? If its windows and on a local drive and you have versioning set up, go to the parent folder, click properties, see previous versions - may have to a wait a few minutes for it to populate (literally a few minutes). 

[paulinalawson]

SAS Server is on Windows. Under Previous Versions it says "There are no previous versions available". 

I see that Shadow Copies of Shared Folders to make Previous Versions available is not enabled and configured on the file server.

[Reeza]

:'( then its bye bye unless you can get a backup copy from a nightly/weekly backup. That's usually time intensive/$$.

[SASKiwi]

If this dataset was stored in a server folder, check with your IT folks regarding server backups, and whether you can get the dataset restored from backup. If this was stored on a PC then it is unlikely to be backed up anywhere and SAS does not do backups itself.

[paulinalawson]

Dataset has been stored on server folder.

[paulinalawson]

Hi,

One of our user accidentally overwrote the original dataset. Could anyone please tell me how to recover previous version of the dataset?

I appreciate the help.

Regards,

Paulina

[nayakig]

Not sure how you can do that in SAS, but restore-backup team in your company should be able to recover that for you ! you just need to tell them the date and time that you want the dataset or any file for that matter..! for example if your friend over write the dataset on 12 today, you ask them to restore the same dataset from 11.59 or before..!

[ballardw]

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@paulinalawson wrote:

Hi,

One of our user accidentally overwrote the original dataset. Could anyone please tell me how to recover previous version of the dataset?

I appreciate the help.

Regards,

Paulina

---

If you do not have a backup (after checking with your IT staff) then how was the data set created initially? If it was read from another data source did you keep that program and source file? If so, rerun that code (and any cleaning/modification step up do but not the code which destroyed.

Now, go back through all of your code and change all the instances of

Data olddataset;

   set olddataset;

to something like

Data newerdataset;

    set olddataset;

to prevent this.

And beat all the programmers/users that use that old/old syntax with wet spaghetti noodles until they promise to stop.

It might not hurt to bill the time/effort cost to the offending persons project budget as a lesson if possible.

[Kurt_Bremser]

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@paulinalawson wrote:

Hi,

One of our user accidentally overwrote the original dataset. Could anyone please tell me how to recover previous version of the dataset?

I appreciate the help.

Regards,

Paulina

---

Very easy. Restore from your backup.

[Kurt_Bremser]

One of our user accidentally overwrote the original dataset. Could anyone please tell me how to recover previous version of the dataset?

I appreciate the help.

Regards,

Paulina