A major warning to Zoho Creator Users about backup limitations

Hello everyone,

I felt compelled to write this topic to warn fellow Zoho Creator users about what happened to my business and the potential risks to yours.

A piece of rogue deluge script in our system deleted thousands of records which had multiple links to subforms. Imagine our horror when we realised this.

We immediately contacted Zoho Support and looked at our backup. What ensued was perhaps the most stressful two weeks of my life as we tried to retrieve the data. Whilst Zoho support was helpful (particular thanks to KK and Hepsi) the fact that I had to manually intervene myself for hours of my own time, just to reimport the data was totally unacceptable and should be a warning to other Zoho Creator users that your data is not safe.

There was no way to simply reimport the data. In the backup it was held across multiple spreadsheets and even Zoho couldn't simply reimport it. They had to spend two weeks coming up with a solution to help me reimport the data.

The data was business critical, but not so much that we were unable to run our business. However, if it had been Zoho would not have been fit for purpose to safeguard our data.

Whilst Zoho has acknowledged the problem, they have simply offered me a month free of Zoho Creator which I think is atrocious based on the time our company had to invest to even help retrieve data that I was under the impression was secure and easily retrievable.

If you are considering Zoho Creator, don't. Your data is not safe and you could find yourself in the situation I have been in. I am appalled at Zoho's approach to this thinking that the matter is now sorted because they finally helped retrieve (most) of the data. The route to get there was terrifying and the fact that Zoho did not have a way to do this simply is totally unacceptable.

We have been loyal Zoho users for years, but this experience has left such a bad taste in my mouth that I want nothing more to do with them. I had to share this experience for others to make it totally transparent that whilst Zoho Creator says it has backups, the backups are not fit for purpose and you must not rely on them to run your business. Once again, Zoho did not take seriously the risk to my business and the amount of company time we had to input ourselves to solve the problem.

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