Smartsheet: Quick Backup

Today, I realized I had about two dozen sheets I wanted to remove from Smartsheet. Being me, I didn’t / couldn’t just hit the “delete” key, but the thought of converting them to Templates or exporting them one by one had my finger hovering over that key, slightly trembling (I exaggerate, but not by much).

It occurred to me that if they were all together in a Workspace, I could request a backup and get them that way. Oh! Spending time to save time.

I moved them all to a temporary Workspace and got set to request the backup. That’s when I noticed something I hadn’t before, or if I had, paid it no mind.

“What does that do?” I thought.

Well, it turns out, it exports all of the items in the Workspace to a single Excel file. Each Smartsheet is its own Excel worksheet with an additional one for the Comments/Discussions.

That format was actually preferred to twenty-something separate Excel files and it was quicker (I didn’t to wait for the Backup to process).

It looks like I found a viable alternative to the normal Backup system. I looked around the Help Center but did not find anything that implied this was what I could expect, either. I’m sure it is there, I just did not find it in my quick search.

Further quick testing seems to imply that Templates and Reports may also show up in the Excel file. I’ll dig further some other time. So far, I’ve only run into one hitch – Smartsheet limits exports to 10,000 rows, so if the data exceeds that, a Backup will be the method of choice.

 

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