---
title: "How to restore records lost after wrong merging by Survey ID"
url: "https://openforis.support/questions/4384/how-to-restore-records-lost-after-wrong-merging-by-survey-id"
tags: ["arena", "collect-mobile", "arena-mobile"]
status: "answered"
score: 0
answer_count: 1
asked: "2025-12-01T13:00:25"
last_activity: "2025-12-02T09:04:54"
source: "Open Foris Support - Q&A Forum"
license: "Copyright Open Foris, 2026. Some rights reserved under creative commons license."
---

# How to restore records lost after wrong merging by Survey ID

Asked by Moh-1290 on 2025-12-01

Hello,

We have used Arena to collect data on 960 points across five rangelands in Somaliland, Somalia. This was our first experience in using of Open Arena platform so we are still learning the ropes..

Our data collectors made a few mistakes in recording data first week by registering data under wrong Survey IDs, which they corrected afterwards. However, they made the corrections only on tablets used for the fieldwork by just allocating the new corrected Survey IDs but never updated Arena landing files for these corrections, or deleted the wrong points already uploaded to Arena. They just went back to the field with the tablets and collected new data including data for points they found to be incorrectly Survey ID labelled but no data was actually collected for.

At the end of the data collection campaign they uploaded the data by using 'update or new records' feature, and had a dozen or so new data points refusing to be uploaded due to conflicting records with red error markers. At that points they used the second feature allowing 'merging conflicting records'. After the merging, the points that were refusing to upload disappeared but the total number of records decreased by the same number which we have interpreted as merger resulting to one of the conflicting records being deleted permanently from both tablets and Arena platform, but some of its information overlayed on the existing records.

PROBLEM: We now have a lot of points which are listed with a certain ID (e.g. 3)  under records but when activated 'edit' feature for that record and inspected this is registered with a different ID (e.g. 125), and in some cases with mixed data, e.g. GPS coordinates for the ID and pictures for the second ID, or even worse.

QUESTION: Is there any way we can restore data to the point before merging records so that we can manually edit all the affected points to ensure that all have correct Survey IDs and data before re-uploading the records? 

We thought about restoring tablets to date and time merging/uploading new data, but were unsure of whether all records will be in the hard disc for restoration, or perhaps some were uploaded from device RAM. The fear is that in the later case restoration will be partial, leading to lose even greater number of records.

We have worked on this for 3 weeks/8-10 hours per day in a very challenging environments stretching over approx. 800, and wish to avoid delating all affected points (some 70 points) and recollecting all this afresh if possible.

Forum's advice on this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Mohamud


## Answer (score 0, by Stefano (OF) on 2025-12-01)

Link: https://openforis.support/questions/4384/how-to-restore-records-lost-after-wrong-merging-by-survey-id/4385

Dear Mohamud,  
We don't have an official way to restore records in Arena Mobile, but we can try to restore the records from one of your backups.  
In Arena Mobile, once a record is merged into another one, it is marked as "merged" and hidden to the user, but it will be still recoverable if you take a full backup of the data (from the Settings).  
We will contact you to your private email address to solve this problem together with you.  
Many thanks,  
Open Foris Team

> Many thanks for finding a way to restoring the merged data Stefano. This is a huge relieve for us. I look forward to connecting with you via email. King regards, Mohamud (Moh-1290)
> Dear Mohamud, I've already sent a message to your private email address, please check the spam folder, thanks! Stefano (Stefano (OF))