Best Practices for Data Backup for Formsite Forms

Formsite account owners have access to many options for processing their results data. Using these features, form owners create systems for many reasons including data backup processes. Sending the results to other systems allow form owners ways to secure their data through redundancy.

Is Data Backup Important?

Storing data in their Formsite account can serve many customers for a long time. Forms that collect a lot of data, however, may find themselves needing to delete data for some reasons. Reasons for deleting results include:

• New year rollover
• Editing the form
• Approaching account limits
• Legal and security reasons

Regardless of the reason, Formsite recommends regular exports of the Results Table. Periodic data backup provides security and confidence from data loss and allows for restoring any results by the form owner. These tips help form owners set up their own systems for safeguarding their data.

Options for Data Backup

Routine results exports provides the most reliable way of backing up your data. Using the forms’ Results -> Exports settings, form owners are able to download a spreadsheet containing all the results data.

Attachments submitted to forms need exporting from the Results -> Export -> Attachments page. Performing this export creates a zip archive containing all the uploaded files.

Scheduled exports let account owners automate the results export process and are set to run at specific intervals. The system performs the export according to the settings and optionally send emails with the link to access the export file. Exports that do not send emails get listed on the Results -> Scheduled Exports page for future reference.

Notification emails allow form owners to send a record of every completed result to any email account. Some account owners send to their own account and set up a filter in their inbox, while others send to a dedicated backup account.

Integrations like Google Sheets, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, and others can also serve as backup destinations. The Google Sheets integration lets form owners make a copy of every result to a spreadsheet. The cloud storage integrations provide a destination for Results Docs.