Data Loss in People Table: How to Recover Missing Rows

Dustin S. · 2025-08-07 21:27:39.454185+00

Thousands of rows of data randomly wiped out. Was making edits to my table when suddenly most all of the data I had in the "People table" vanished and was replaced with blank boxes. How can I fix this?

Data Loss in People Table: How to Recover Missing Rows | Clay

8 comments

· Sorted by Oldest

Clay
APP
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Unfortunately, Clay doesn't track row history or deletions, so there's no way to recover overwritten data directly from within the platform. For missing or overwritten records, you'll need to re-import or manually update the data. If you're seeing empty rows after filtering, this might be a front-end performance issue. Try clearing your cache and refreshing your screen to see if the empty rows persist. Since you're in a shared workspace, check if someone else made changes by reviewing team activity and permissions. If you need further help, request human assistance by clicking on "Talk to a person."
Hari K.
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Hey Dustin! It looks like the only data currently in the table is in the last two rows here - what actions specifically did you take leading up to this? For context, we can't currently restore tables to earlier states or recover deleted data
Dustin S.
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Hi Hari K., I mapped the company name field to the output from the "lookup single row in other table" column. After clicking that, the other 2,000+ rows of data wiped out immediately.
Hari K.
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Hey Dustin - I'm so sorry that happened. I've investigated and this feels like a one-off bug that should not have happened. Unfortunately, I think you will need to re-do the people search to repopulate results here fresh as we have no way of recovering the lost data. I definitely understand how frustrating this can be, so I've just added 2000 credits to your account to make things feel better.
Dustin S.
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Hi Hari K., this is an extremely disappointing and frustrating bug, because not only did we lose all of the Clay credits, but we also lost ~$1,000 worth of API costs. I would hope the team would consider refunding the needed amount of credits to re-run our AI API columns with clay tokens. This comes out to 18,200 credits (0.5+1+1+1+1+0.5+0.5+0.5+1)*2600
Bo (.
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I’ve gone ahead and added the 18,200 credits back. That said, after reviewing your table, it looks like the behavior was expected due to auto-update being on. When you update a field that other AI enrichments depend on — like a lookup column — it marks the data as stale and automatically reruns the downstream enrichments. That’s why the data got wiped and retriggered. Totally understand how frustrating that can be. Here’s a helpful guide to avoid this in the future: 📘 Clay Credit Conservation 🎥 Video example of stale data Just a heads-up: we’ve covered this one, but we won’t be able to issue repeat refunds for this same issue going forward — so best to disable auto-update before changing key fields like this. Let me know if anything’s unclear.
Dustin S.
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Thanks Bo (. for helping out here. But I did want to clarify for your bug reporting that usuallly when I make changes, it will “re-trigger” the enrichment columns, but that is not what happened in this case. For this situation, I did not get any indication that rows were re-triggering. Everything immediately went blank, including non-enrichment, regular text columns. Had never experienced something like that before and I work quite a bit with enrichment columns. Thanks again for the support.
Bo (.
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Got it — thanks for pointing this out. I’ll run checks on our end to investigate.

Loading comments

Clay
APP
·
·
Unfortunately, Clay doesn't track row history or deletions, so there's no way to recover overwritten data directly from within the platform. For missing or overwritten records, you'll need to re-import or manually update the data. If you're seeing empty rows after filtering, this might be a front-end performance issue. Try clearing your cache and refreshing your screen to see if the empty rows persist. Since you're in a shared workspace, check if someone else made changes by reviewing team activity and permissions. If you need further help, request human assistance by clicking on "Talk to a person."
Hari K.
·
·
Hey Dustin! It looks like the only data currently in the table is in the last two rows here - what actions specifically did you take leading up to this? For context, we can't currently restore tables to earlier states or recover deleted data
Dustin S.
·
·
Hi Hari K., I mapped the company name field to the output from the "lookup single row in other table" column. After clicking that, the other 2,000+ rows of data wiped out immediately.
Hari K.
·
·
Hey Dustin - I'm so sorry that happened. I've investigated and this feels like a one-off bug that should not have happened. Unfortunately, I think you will need to re-do the people search to repopulate results here fresh as we have no way of recovering the lost data. I definitely understand how frustrating this can be, so I've just added 2000 credits to your account to make things feel better.
Dustin S.
·
·
Hi Hari K., this is an extremely disappointing and frustrating bug, because not only did we lose all of the Clay credits, but we also lost ~$1,000 worth of API costs. I would hope the team would consider refunding the needed amount of credits to re-run our AI API columns with clay tokens. This comes out to 18,200 credits (0.5+1+1+1+1+0.5+0.5+0.5+1)*2600
Bo (.
·
·
I’ve gone ahead and added the 18,200 credits back. That said, after reviewing your table, it looks like the behavior was expected due to auto-update being on. When you update a field that other AI enrichments depend on — like a lookup column — it marks the data as stale and automatically reruns the downstream enrichments. That’s why the data got wiped and retriggered. Totally understand how frustrating that can be. Here’s a helpful guide to avoid this in the future: 📘 Clay Credit Conservation 🎥 Video example of stale data Just a heads-up: we’ve covered this one, but we won’t be able to issue repeat refunds for this same issue going forward — so best to disable auto-update before changing key fields like this. Let me know if anything’s unclear.
Dustin S.
·
·
Thanks Bo (. for helping out here. But I did want to clarify for your bug reporting that usuallly when I make changes, it will “re-trigger” the enrichment columns, but that is not what happened in this case. For this situation, I did not get any indication that rows were re-triggering. Everything immediately went blank, including non-enrichment, regular text columns. Had never experienced something like that before and I work quite a bit with enrichment columns. Thanks again for the support.
Bo (.
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·
Got it — thanks for pointing this out. I’ll run checks on our end to investigate.