At 2:45 PM on a Wednesday, Jennifer realized she had made a critical mistake.
As the Operations Manager for a mid-sized logistics company, she had just completed what should have been a routine task: updating the status column for completed shipments in their monday.com board. But in her rush before the weekly stakeholder meeting, she had accidentally selected all 1,200 items instead of just the 50 completed ones.
With a single bulk edit action, she had marked every shipment in their system as “Complete”—including hundreds of active orders and future deliveries. The monday.com undo button had vanished after its 60-second window, and there was no way to reverse the bulk column update.
Within minutes, the consequences cascaded: warehouse teams couldn’t identify which shipments actually needed processing, customer service fielded confused calls about “delivered” orders that hadn’t shipped, and automated billing systems started invoicing unfinished work.
As Jennifer scrambled to manually fix 1,200 corrupted records using the activity log, she discovered the cruel reality facing many monday.com users: when bulk operations go wrong, there’s often no practical way to fix them.
This isn’t hypothetical—it’s based on actual user experiences shared in monday.com community forums.
According to a survey of 70,000 technology leaders, 68% of organizations experience some form of SaaS data loss annually, and for organizations without adequate backup protection, downtime now costs an average of $14,056 per minute—rising to $23,750 per minute for large enterprises, according to a 2024 report. The true cost of data loss continues to grow.
monday.com has revolutionized the way businesses manage key workflows, but even the most robust platforms aren’t immune to data loss. Whether it’s due to accidental deletion, integration mishaps, or system errors, losing critical project data can bring your operations to a standstill.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at essential backup strategies and recovery methods to enhance your monday.com data protection.
Data loss in monday.com can happen in various ways, and the consequences can be severe for business operations. Let’s examine the most common scenarios and how to address them.
Consider the cascade effect when an entire workspace fails: your sales team loses lead tracking data mid-quarter, your marketing team can’t access campaign plans during a crucial launch, and your customer success team has no visibility into client issues. The ripple effects extend beyond immediate productivity loss—damaged client relationships, missed revenue targets, and team confidence erosion can take months to rebuild.
Traditional IT backup solutions weren’t designed for modern SaaS platforms like monday.com. Unlike files on a server, your monday.com data lives in a collection of boards, integrations, and workflows. When disaster strikes, you need more than generic cloud storage—you need a solution that understands the intricate relationships between your project data.
The problem: Complete workspace misconfiguration or data corruption can occur due to system updates, user errors, or platform issues.
Real-world impact: Without proper workspace backups, teams can lose months of project data, custom board configurations, and workflow automations in a single incident.
How Rewind can help:
Good news! Once you’ve installed Rewind for monday.com, there’s nothing to do as the tool backs up your monday.com data automatically. You can also initiate an on-demand backup by clicking Back Up Now in the Rewind Vault.
Howard Kennedy, a UK-based law firm, uses monday.com to manage business operations, legislative timelines, billing, and view actual costs versus estimates across multiple departments from HR to finance to IT.
Consider what would happen if Howard Kennedy’s operational data in monday.com became corrupted during their busiest period. Without granular backup data, they could face manual reconstruction of client billing data, legislative timeline tracking, and cross-departmental cost analysis.
The problem: While user errors are easier to detect, integration failures don’t announce themselves. They happen silently, often corrupting data gradually over days or weeks before anyone notices. By the time you discover the problem, standard recovery windows have passed and the corruption has spread throughout your connected systems. Users can perform a bulk update or import that inadvertently deletes data. Users frequently report errors like “Your automation has failed due to a resource not being found”, which can lead to data inconsistencies or loss.
Real-world examples:
How Rewind can fix integration issues:
The 3-2-1 rule isn’t just about data protection—it’s about business resilience. Relying solely on any single platform, no matter how reliable you think it is, creates a dangerous single point of failure.
The problem: Relying solely on monday.com’s built-in recovery features isn’t sufficient for comprehensive data protection. Platform outages, account suspensions, or service discontinuations could make your monday.com data inaccessible. As noted in monday.com’s own support documentation, users “cannot back up files and data on your own servers as monday.com is hosted on a cloud server.”
Why it matters: The 3-2-1 backup rule advises that you keep three copies of your data, on two different media, with one copy off-site. This time-tested strategy ensures your monday.com data can survive any disaster scenario.
Understanding the 3-2-1 backup rule:
How Rewind supports the 3-2-1 backup rule for monday.com:
The problem: In a 2024 Backblaze survey, only 42% of organizations that experienced data loss were able to restore all their data. Many discover their backups are corrupted or incomplete only when they need them most.
Why testing matters: Backups are only valuable if they actually work when you need them. Regular testing ensures your data can be successfully recovered.
How to test with Rewind:
Data corruption often resembles the ‘boiling frog’ phenomenon: it happens so gradually that teams don’t notice until it’s too late. The challenge isn’t just recovering data, it’s knowing exactly when the corruption started and what ‘good’ data looks like.
The problem: Users often discover data loss incidents hours later, as one reported in the monday.com community: “A couple of hours went by, I opened my board again and the groups were still there but most of the sub items were gone.” Without proper version comparison, you might restore to the wrong point in time.
Why comparison matters: Before restoring any data, you need to understand exactly what changed and when to ensure you don’t accidentally overwrite recent important updates.
The “What You See is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) method:
Code-level method:
The pressure during a data loss incident can lead to poor recovery decisions. Teams often choose the nuclear option (restoring everything) when surgical precision is needed, or they attempt granular fixes when the problem is systemic. These decisions are often made under time pressure with incomplete information about the scope of data loss.
The wrong recovery approach can make situations worse: overwriting recent good data with old backups, or missing interconnected data dependencies that cause new failures downstream.
The problem: Different data loss scenarios require different recovery approaches. Restoring your entire workspace for a small issue is overkill, while granular restores might miss interconnected data dependencies.
| Granular restore is best for: – Single item accidental deletion – Individual column data corruption – Specific automation malfunction – Limited user error affecting few items |
Advanced restore is best for: – Multiple board corruption – Workspace-wide integration failures – System-level configuration loss – Major data synchronization issues |
Rewind’s restore options:
The problem: As your monday.com workspace grows, locating specific data for recovery becomes increasingly difficult.
Organization challenges:
How Rewind can help you find data:
As organizations scale, SaaS sprawl becomes inevitable. Different departments adopt separate instances, acquisitions bring new accounts into the fold, and client work demands isolated environments. This organic growth creates a backup nightmare, as critical data is scattered across multiple platforms with no unified protection strategy.
When disaster strikes one instance, teams often discover too late that their backup strategy doesn’t extend to all their monday.com environments. The result: uneven data protection that leaves some business units vulnerable while others are secure.
The problem: Organizations often use multiple monday.com accounts for different departments, projects, or clients. Managing backups across multiple instances creates complexity and increases the risk of data gaps.
Common multi-instance scenarios:
Rewind’s multi-instance management:
Data loss in monday.com doesn’t have to be catastrophic. By implementing comprehensive backup strategies with Rewind, following the proven 3-2-1 backup rule, and regularly testing your recovery procedures, you can ensure your project data remains safe and accessible.
Remember that backups are insurance—you hope you’ll never need them, but when you do, you’ll be grateful you invested in proper protection. Start protecting your monday.com workspace today, before data loss becomes a reality.
The combination of automated backups, multiple storage locations, and granular recovery options provides the comprehensive protection your business needs to operate confidently in today’s digital environment.
Ready to enhance your monday.com data protection? Try Rewind for free.
