All Collections
Data Backup
Troubleshooting
Why are LastReferencedDate and LastViewedDate fields not backed up?
Why are LastReferencedDate and LastViewedDate fields not backed up?

The fields are used internally by Salesforce to keep track of recently viewed and recently referenced records by the current user.

Valerio Chang avatar
Written by Valerio Chang
Updated over a week ago

Unlike LastModifiedDate and CreatedDate fields, both LastReferencedDate and LastViewedDate fields are not system audit fields and therefore cannot be reliably used to keep track of who last viewed and/or referenced the record.


When backing up objects with LastReferencedDate and LastViewedDate fields, their data is unique to the user that is running the data backup job. This makes the data stored in those fields not particularly useful for any backup, audit or restore tasks.

For example, if user A has viewed a record, the LastViewedDate field data will not be updated for user B. If user B has a data backup job running both fields will have no values until user B views and/or references the record.

In addition, both fields are periodically nullified by Salesforce and can produce false positives or confusing behavior, which distracts from the important changes in your org. For these reasons, we've excluded these fields from data backup jobs.


โ€‹



Earlier versions of Gearset data backup included these fields. As of 28th October 2020, these fields were excluded. The first run of any data backup jobs that excludes these fields will contain "extra" changed records. These can manifest in one of two ways:
โ€‹
1. If the LastReferencedDate or LastViewedDate had a value then the fields will appear as having been deleted. The details page will look something like this:

2. If the LastReferencedDate or LastViewedDate did not have a value, then the record will classed as "changed" but there will be no differences shown in the diff. This will only happen on a full run. The details page will look something like this:

This behavior is isolated to runs immediately following the exclusion of these fields and a warning banner will be shown for affected runs.

Did this answer your question?