SAS Data Sets records deleted.. Is there any way to recover.

[arnab61]

I have mistakenly executed one data step that updated one of the permanent tables. Can anybody tell me is there any way to restore the data sets with the earlier version??

I will highly appreciate if anybody comesback with a quick and fast solution..

[LinusH]

Assuming that you can't programmatically restore the tables to it's previous state, there are just a few thing that can help you:

• File system restore, contact the responsible personnel for backups.
• The Base SAS table is stored as generations, see documentation how to rollback to an earlier version.
• The table is under audit trail. You can you programming to extract the changes from the trail and update the table accordingly.

[sas_9]

I guess IT support always has physical backup for all your server drive (D:\, E:\ whatever) and retention for daily physical content also should be there. you can use their help...

[data_null__]

In future you may want to add ACCESS=READONLY to your libname statements.

Or you can add ALTER or WRITE passwords to the data set you don't want to change.

[voroslaszlo]

Yes there is. If you connect with R to SAS R has its own dataset reader interface what draws through the deleted records too and you can undelete them in R.

Another possible option what I have not tried for 25 years - so maybe it does not work anymore - is dBase. As far I remember, dBase export from SAS contained the deleted records too, and you could set them back to undeleted in dBase. There still exists dBase somewhere out there but I did not try it with this version.