We're shutting down Dynamics CRM - how do we archive the data? Attachments especially

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Posted on by Michael F.

We installed DCRM about five years ago, however it never took off so we're sunsetting the system. It was not used extensively, however there are some phone/meeting notes and attachments in the system that we must retain for records retention reasons. I had initially planned on dumping the data out directly from the system tables (create a few useful views/queries), however I now see that there are about 13GB of attachments in the system. I was wondering if there is some sort of document with directions on how to archive DCRM data, or if someone could let me know how best to export the attachment data from the database (BLOB). We are AWS customers, not Azure, which may complicate things. Ideally we'd like to store the data on premise as it will rarely be accessed.

Thanks

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Michael F. 5 on at

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RE: We're shutting down Dynamics CRM - how do we archive the data? Attachments especially

That appears to have been what I needed. We've used XRMToolbox in the past, so I was able to install this plug in and once there it allows you to export Note or E-mail attachments. Since our Exchange system is the system of record for e-mails, this plug in allows us to exclude the e-mails from being export, so the size of our archive files are now significantly less than expected!

Thank you!

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Kokulan 18,054 on at

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RE: We're shutting down Dynamics CRM - how do we archive the data? Attachments especially

Hi

You could try the following XrmToolBox plugin, it allows you to download all the attachments to a local folder. When you select the folder, you can also point to mapped S3 bucket directly if you would like to keep them in the cloud.

An example of : How to mount Amazon S3 Bucket as a Windows Drive

tntdrive.com/mount-amazon-s3-bucket.aspx

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Michael F. 5 on at

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RE: We're shutting down Dynamics CRM - how do we archive the data? Attachments especially

I hadn't thought of using Kingswaysoft. We have used that to upload data into DCRM, so it makes sense that we can use it to pull it out too. We use the SSIS plug in, so I think I will give that a try. I haven't used it for attachments, just tabular data, so we'll see how that works.

Thanks!

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Gary Letter 1,267 on at

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RE: We're shutting down Dynamics CRM - how do we archive the data? Attachments especially

Hi Michael,

KingswaySoft has some great ETL tools for extracting CRM data. You can use them to export all the data and write the attachments to an external system like OneDrive or Sharepoint. Follow the link below to a post that describes a way to pull the attachments for CRM Notes and Email Messages.

http://www.kingswaysoft.com/blog/2017/03/21/Extracting-CRM-Attachments-with-Ease

Gary Letter
NextLevel Business Systems

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Madalina Toma on at

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RE: We're shutting down Dynamics CRM - how do we archive the data? Attachments especially

Hi Michael,

Thank you for the post.

Regarding the data inside Dynamics, I had achieved a couple of months ago during an internal assessment something very similar with what you want using flows.

As you are an on premises customer, this will not be possible for you, but here are some ideas on how to get the data out of the system.

You can develop a console app to retrieve the data, the way you need to implement it is the following:

You will go ahead and use crmserviceclient to connect to the organization and from there you will retrieve your data keeping in mind the attachments are encoded, therefore you need to decode them first.

Once you have your data out stored somewhere else you can go ahead and turn off the system.

Just for reference, I had performed an Web API query in order to get the content of a Note having an attachment and this is how it looks like:

The description of that Web API query is below:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-engagement/web-api/annotation?view=dynamics-ce-odata-9

If you do not have a version 9 system, please change the v9.0 with the first two sets of digits you have within your About section of the system, corresponding with the version.

There are some other options to achieve this functionality, including some Microsoft Labs and third party solutions which will store your data somewhere else like Azure Blob or even SharePoint, but it really depends on your infrastructure.

Good luck!

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