Avoid unintended node deletions

[dnguyen]

Dear Community,

I unintentionally deleted a node in the middle of a complex workflow created by a colleague who already left the company. It took me quite a while to re-construct the workflow. I only recognised that it happened two weeks later when I next triedto execute the workflow.
In fact I only then realised that nodes and connections can be deleted without a warning/confirmation in KNIME. I was unable to find a setting to have a pop-up warning before a node is deleted. Is anyone aware of a setting and/or process set-up to avoid such intended deletions in future? To my best knowledge, in the non-server version there is also no log-file available that could be facilitated to trace and undo such errors? I would also find “non-change” mode useful in case a workflow only needs to be executed but not changed…

Thank you very much for any hints and tips.

Kind regards,

Denis

[thor]

You can enable confirmation dialogs in the preferences:

By default they are enabled therefore I guess you disabled them some time in the past.

[mlauber71]

@dnguyen welcome to the KNIME forum. Sorry to hear about your troubles.

One thing you could do is build yourself some simple backup system to store versions of your workflow as a simple ZIP file with a timestamp (not super fancy but effective):

Copy/Move Files Node

@zedleb I created and example where the KNIME workflow (or workflow group) is being zipped into a file with a current timestamp. And can later be restored to a (separate) folder. [image] [image] This restore can either be automated also or you could do it manually if you need it. [image] [image] Please note you will have to configure the Path variables and workflow names to your needs. I use local paths that will be created dynamically.

Then backup and versioning is a thing in all businesses since all things that can go wrong might do so at any time. So regardless of KNIME or other tools it is always good to have a backup strategy ready. In the case of KNIME it is that the basic version does not have a recycle bin or a longer undo history. Although I understand that something might be on the agenda for the future (AP-11335). The KNIME server has a versioning and recycle option.

Restore Knime workflows

@evert.homan_scilifelab.se I can offer up these threads. Unfortunately if the workflows would not integrate themselves into KNIME like this you might have to revert to a backup. Can you tell us more about your system and the circumstance where the data is being stored (is it some sort of cloud drive?).

[dnguyen]

Dear Thor,

thank you very much for the quick help. I am amazed about this active cmmunity forum! We use a shared workspace and it seems this is a workspace specific entry that had been disabled by one of our colleagues.

Best regards and have a nice day ahead,
Denis

[dnguyen]

Thank you very much @mlauber71 - I will have a detailed look at it in the following days.

Have a great day a ahead and thank you for helping me out!

Denis