Check Links... What can go wrong?

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I have read in many places and heard from many people that you should run check links in a test environment and then back up the production environment prior to running check links there. Why? I have had to do this several times and it seems like a waste of time. Checklinks seems to work all the time. Has anything "bad" ever happened to any of you after running check links? What can be an adverse effect of running check links?

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Richard Wheeler 75,848 Moderator on at

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Check links has the ability to insert or delete records so this could be a bad thing. The best thing to do is to run a backup before running check links. This way if anything bad does happen you roll in the backup. This is more likely to happen with companies that import data from an outside source and fields are not mapped correctly.

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mpolino on at

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To add to Richard's answer, If the checklinks process finds detail transactions with no header it may delete the orphaned detail records. You might actually want to re-create those. You can of course print them but lots of people miss printing, printing fails, etc. With a backup you could conceivably recreate and re-attach the detail records.

Having said that, most of us have probably run checklinks without a backup. I don't view pre-checklinks backups as critical as say, pre-year end close backups.

Mark

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Victoria Yudin 22,769 on at

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Medardo,

I am not sure I have seen the recommendation as "run check links in a test environment AND then back up the production environment prior to running check links there". I think it's typically one or the other.

The reason to run check links in a test environment is to see if it will fix the issue you're having without actually having to run check links in the live environment. This is useful for many companies that need to be up 24/7, or as close to it as possible, or where a particular series will take a very long time running check links and you only want to do this if it will be worth it.

The reason to make a backup is, as Richard and Mark said, because check links may make unintended changes to your data. I have definitely seen this. One time I saw the inventory series check links recreate over 2000 transactions. And that's certainly not as bad as it deleting transactions you didn't want deleted, which I have also seen happen.

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Community Member on at

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Thank you all for your comments.

But how do I now that something went wrong? Do you get this from the reports that check links generates? Or is there a validation process that you normally go through, such as running a trial balance before and after, when running check links?

Last night I ran the check links process in a test environment and it fixed the problem we have, but it is not clear if it fixed other items that we were not aware off, or if it did something that it wasn't supposed to. The resulting report stated that it applied the default currency to transactiosn that did not have a currency. This doesn't tell me much as to what it did.

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Victoria Yudin 22,769 on at

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Medardo,

You really need to go through all the reports carefully. Anything that check links did, it will report on. I typically go over these with my customers the first couple of times, so they learn the gist of what the messages mean and how to check on the transactions listed. Some messages will be very generic and are fine to ignore, others you may want to investigate further just to double check, still others will actually mean that you need to run check links on the same series again, as there is more to be 'fixed'.

Without seeing the exact message word for word, it is sometimes difficult to be sure, but I think the default currency message can typically be ignored, if it is the one I am thinking of. Unless you have a lot of them every time you run Check Links, which may indicate something missing in setup.

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Richard Whaley 25,195 on at

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Medardo,

To add another Richard's comments, most consultants approach a site in response to a call for help and have no idea what has gone on before. I have run checklinks on systems that have not had it run for 2-4 years and it created all kinds of additional problems ( it fixed errors that had been manually fixed, generally ). That's why I would run it in a test environment.

However, if you are running it monthly, the test environment, like Victoria said, is not needed.

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Howard Swerdloff 845 on at

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I have not typically run check links in a test environment other than to get an idea of how long it will take to run. I do ALWAYS backup my database before running check links though. In regards to things that can go wrong, I had run check links on a database which had a problem with the vendor addresses. I still cannot tell you exactly the cause of the issue, but the result was check links removed ALL vendors in the system. Once the vendors were gone, the transactions all showed no vendor found and ap was basically useless. I found restoring the backup and then putting another copy in test, I was able to test scenarios until I could successfully run check links. In that case running a database integrity check in SQL and then check links was successful.

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