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Cannot import a backup export taken of contacts for Dynamics 365 CRM

Hi,

We've recently had an issue with importing contacts into Dynamics. During this time, most of the details of our existing contacts got overwritten with blank values (i.e. first and last name, email, phone number, etc) during an import (from excel). The contacts still 'exist' inside dynamics 365, as what is effectively blank contacts, and still have links to assigned emails, leads, etc. We have an export of our data as a backup prior to this happening, but when we try to import it, we get failure with the error message of "This record could not be updated because the original record no longer exists in Mircrosoft Dynamics 365." I have taken an export of the bad data that is currently in dynamics and compared the values in the '(Do Not Modify)Contact' column, and the values still exist and are the same there. However, the 'row checksum' and 'modified on' do not modify columns are different for the same contact id value. I want to be able to overwrite the blank values in these contacts with the original values from the backup export that was taken, but the error is preventing this.

Is it possible to do so with the last name as the primary key and now being blank (and if so why did it overwrite with blank values in the first place)? Is it something to do with the row checksum and modified on values? Do I need to take the export of the blank values and replace all the first name, last name, etc columns with the correct values and reimport that excel file?

Any guidance and help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Categories:

Microsoft Dynamics CRM

I think your idea towards the end of the post is your best bet. Export all of your contacts from CRM with all of the blank values, then match up the missing data based on the GUID (in one of the starting hidden columns) to fill in the blank data. Then reimport it back into the system. I've found that importing data to existing records pretty much has to be done this way, since the GUID is only one of the checks done on import.

As an alternative, if you want to avoid doing this (and to speed up the process), I might recommend you look at Dataflows. This would allow you to import from the excel file, pull in the contact records from Dataverse, and update them. I have done this before with updates and it works quite well. For some of my client updates, it has been able to process about 95,000 records in around 20 minutes (so also significantly faster than the old-style import, though a bit more technical to set up).

An overview of dataflows across Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365 products - Power Query | Microsoft Learn

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