Import, Export & Backups
Everything to do with getting records in, out, and safely copied. Only a portal administrator can use these. Find them under Data & maintenance.
Import members from a spreadsheet
Bring a campus roster in from Excel instead of typing every person by hand.
- Data & maintenance → Import members.
- Choose the campus this roster belongs to and a preset (North York or Scarborough). The primary sheet is enough; a secondary sheet is optional.
- Upload an .xlsx file or paste a Google Sheets link. CSV is refused, because a household address merged down a family in Excel survives only on the first row of a CSV export.
- Check the staged rows. Nothing has touched a member record yet.
- Apply ready rows.
Everything between step 3 and step 5 is the point of the feature. The staged rows keep the original spreadsheet text beside what was read from it, so a row can be re-read as often as needed. Once applied, the original line is gone.
What the import tells you before you apply
- Duplicate rows in the sheet are collapsed, and the ones removed are listed so you can check that two different people were not merged.
- Addresses it could not read whole are counted with the reason — a missing postcode is not the same problem as an unrecognisable city. The parts it did read are still correct.
- Ministry names it does not recognise are named. This matters more than it looks: the workbook decides who serves where, so a name that matches nothing can remove a membership rather than merely fail to add one.
- Rows with no member type are counted, along with how many could be suggested from the person's age.
What applying does
- People already on file are matched and updated, not duplicated.
- Everyone imported is classified as Member — a spreadsheet says who is on the roster, not what their standing is. Change any that differ afterwards.
- Ministries come from the sheet, which is authoritative: a ministry it does not list is removed. A leader keeps the membership their leadership implies.
- People on that campus who are not in the file lose that campus affiliation. They are not deleted from the church.
Filling blank member types
If rows arrive with no member type, Fill blank member types from age offers one based on the ages of people who already hold each type. It writes to the staged rows only, so you can change them, and it never overwrites a type the sheet supplied. Age indicates a member type here; it does not settle it — check them before applying.
Download member records
Builds a fresh Excel workbook from the database, one sheet per campus or a single campus if you choose one. This is generated from current records, not a copy of the original Drive file.
Back up church data
Create backup copies both databases into a private folder on the server that is not reachable from the web. Do this before a large import, or anything else that changes many records at once.
Advanced backup options holds the parts that are occasionally needed and are not what you came here for: each database separately, and snapshots of the current events, schedules and member records as data files — useful for comparing what changed between two points in time.
Recent backups & exports
What has been saved, most recent first, described by what it contains rather than by its filename — Member records · Database backup rather than mysql.people.08_25.1422.sql. The stored paths are still there under Technical details when somebody needs them.
There is no restore in the portal. Backups are written and downloaded; putting one back is a deliberate act performed by whoever administers the server.