Form Submissions Vanished

Hi @pankti12

I hope you are doing well today.

If you had a paid membership with us, it should not affect your submissions.

• is there any other admin on the site which could delete those submissions?
• In Forminator – > Settings -> Data what is the “Uninstallation” setup, Preserve or Reset? Also does anyone uninstall Forminator when your membership expired and Reset value was set up in “Uninstallation”?
• In your Form -> settings does “Store Submissions in Database” is enabled or disabled?
• Is there any site backup which you can restore from previous days and see does those submissions exist? Please check if you can restore any backup on staging site ot not affect live site.

Kind Regards,
Kris

Hi @wpmudevsupport13, I am doing well, and I hope you are doing well as well, below are the responses to the questions you asked:

• is there any other admin on the site who could delete those submissions?
  No, we have only one admin.
• In Forminator – > Settings -> Data what is the “Uninstallation” setup, Preserve or Reset? Also does anyone uninstall Forminator when your membership expired and Reset value was set up in “Uninstallation”?
  It is Preserve
• In your Form -> settings does “Store Submissions in Database” is enabled or disabled?
  It is enabled
• Is there any site backup which you can restore from previous days and see does those submissions exist? Please check if you can restore any backup on staging site ot not affect live site.
  Yes, but I do not have a staging environment so will have to check the database file if it has any data, which table should I be looking for?

Hi @pankti12

Thank you for responses!

As my colleague already explained, cancelation or expiration of subscription doesn’t remove any data so the issue must be different here.

Your responses make me think that there is a chance that data is there actually so additional things to check would be:

– are all the forms related to those missing submissions still there or where they removed?
– if they were not removed – are they in “Published” or “Draft” state?

I’m asking this because one of the common simple issues is that form gets removed or set to draft – in which case submissions are not visible on Submissions page:

a) if form is set to draft, all that’s needed is to publish it again and submissions would become available

b) if form was removed, then I’m afraid submission can only be checked directly in DB (see below)

So that’s one thing to make sure about.

The second additional thing – if those forms are there and are published – is data retention. First, for each form go to “Settings” page of the form and check if “Submissions” under “Privacy” option is set to “Use default” or “Custom”.

If it’s custom, check what’s the setting. For example, if this is set to 180 days then after 180 days submission would be automatically erased and not available (even in DB).

If it’s set to “use default”, please go to “Formiantor -> Settings -> Submissions” and check setting of “Submission Retention”. If it’s not set to “Forever” it’s possible that the set time has already passed by and in such case submission would also be erased entirely.

—-

Finally:

– if you confirm it’s not case of data retentions (as described above)
– and that all the forms are in place and are published
– and submissions are still not visible

you would need to check following tables in the DB (note, “wp_” prefix may be different on your setup):

wp_frmt_form_entry
wp_frmt_form_entry_meta

This is similar “construction” as for regular “posts”:

– the first table holds submission ID (entry_id), type, form ID and date
– the second holds actual submission data – so if you see e.g. 123 entry_id in first one, you can search second one by entry_id 123 to see if it actually contains data.

Kind regards,
Adam

Hi @wpmudev-support8, I hope you are doing well, below are the updates on your queries:

– are all the forms related to those missing submissions still there or where they removed?

Form is there
– if they were not removed – are they in “Published” or “Draft” state?

It is in Draft state but I tried to publish and then check.

The second additional thing – if those forms are there and are published – is data retention. First, for each form go to “Settings” page of the form and check if “Submissions” under “Privacy” option is set to “Use default” or “Custom”.

It is set to Forever

I also checked in database and both of the mentioned tables were empty.

Thank you

Hi @pankti12

Thank you for response!

The key information here is this:

I also checked in database and both of the mentioned tables were empty.

I’m afraid this means that those submission are really gone and the only possible way to get them back would be to get them back from some site/db backup -if there is such backup available.

There is no any special tool or feature to restore only submissions so it would either be restoring entire site or at least DB or – if form was already there before backup was created – possibly extract only those two tables from backups and import them to DB. But how to do that, that also depends on how the backup is made. I mean, e.g. if it’s a zip file and there are separate sql files for each DB table it would be relatively easy but if backup is in some custom format (like e.g. plugins similar to All in One Migration and such do) it may be more complicated.

But with that said, I must admit I don’t have answer on “why” they are missing. Formiantor itself would only remove data if “Privacy” option would be set to some custom time but not if it’s set to “Forever”.

That is, unless somebody experimented with that option and e.g. set it to short custom time, then entries got deleted and then option was set back to “Forever”. I’m assuming you didn’t do it – but are you the only admin of the site?

Where there any “db optimization” plugins used on site (eg to “clean up” DB tables) or some 3rd-party security plugin/tool run that deals not only with files but also DB?

Are you sure that e.g. your host didn’t restore some older DB backup (even partially) “in background” on their own at some point, unintentionally wiping out that data?

I’m asking because I actually never seen the case (other than mentioned above) of Forminator removing submission “on its own” and I’m working with/supporting Forminator ever since it was first releases – so I’m quite surprised with this case.

Also, do you have some sort of “activity log” active on site (either via our own free Defender plugin or some 3rd-party plugin) that logs actions done on site by various users and/or scripts? IF yes, it may be worth looking into it to see if any possibly related actions are logged there (note: it would only help if such tool was already active on site before the issue happened).

Kind regards,
Adam

Hi @wpmudev-support8, thank you for the response, hope you are doing well.