[ARCHIVED] Automated SIS Imports Deleting Records?

[alvarezj]

Howdy folks, first time poster here - I just started working for this institution, and I need to troubleshoot their Canvas integration. It appears that records are getting deleted from our Canvas instance on a semi-regular basis, but the batch files themselves do not have "delete" statuses. The only thing I could think of was that perhaps imports though the API are set as "full batch updates" by default. Does anyone know whether this is true?

Thanks!

Josh Alvarez

[richpeachey]

Hello, I'm curious if you had any luck figuring this out.  We had a similar experience this weekend -- an automated SIS synch process caused Canvas to delete all our Fall term courses.  I also noticed when I go to the SIS Import page in our admin portal it states a lot of batches are pending processing, but seems to be stuck.  Each time our SIS tries to do another synch, the number of pending batches increases.  I'm curious if you saw the same?

[crierk]

Any luck with your problem? I am have the same issue.

[tbularzik]

From https://canvas.instructure.com/doc/api/file.sis_csv.html:

If the option to do a "full batch update" is selected in the UI, then this SIS upload is considered to be the new canonical set of data, and data from previous SIS imports that isn't present in this import will be deleted.

There are a few different options to use this delete-what-isn't-sent logic on smaller groups of data, instead of on everything in Canvas (for example, a group of terms or data with a certain "data set identifier" -- the link above should be a good reference. Hope that helps!