In this tutorial, Shaun Whynacht (host of The Automation Show and founder of Blue Cow Marketing) walks viewers through recovering contacts that were accidentally mass‑deleted in GoHighLevel. He explains why the issue arose—a client accidentally deleted about 1,000 contacts during a database cleanup—and demonstrates the recovery process in a sandbox account. First, he shows the built‑in Restore option, which can bring back contacts one‑by‑one, and then the Bulk Actions → Restore feature for larger batches. He highlights how to view restore job statistics, download the list of restored contact IDs, and use the Import Update workflow to re‑import that file, setting Contact ID as the primary identifier. During import he adds a custom tag (e.g., “bulk restore Sept 26”) so the restored records can be filtered and identified later. The video uses sample Disney‑character contacts and references a real client case where 1,084 contacts were recovered. The tutorial ends with a quick verification that the tagged contacts appear correctly in the contact list.
Chapters
Hey, what's up everyone? I'm Shaun Whynacht with The Automation Show as well as the founder here at Blue Cow Marketing. This tutorial that I want to walk you through can come in very handy when you have mass deleted a bunch of contacts and you're like, oh no, what do I do? I need to get them back because I screwed up and did something wrong. So, um, this is going to walk you through how to first get them back, where do you find that, and then how do you identify the ones that you brought in. I'll explain why this all came to be. So this came about because we had a client reach out to us who had been doing a lot of database cleanup, and they're doing some mass deleting. I think they mass deleted in a batch about 1,000 contacts that were there, and then a couple weeks later identified that there were some key client records that accidentally got selected for deletion in that., and but they needed them back. We couldn't just add the contact in because all the history was, was gone, right? Um, so here we are in my sandbox account. It's a HighLevel account we use. Ours is called Client Connector, uh, and I've got some sample Disney characters in here. So we're going to go ahead and we're going to just randomly select, you know, a bunch of them that's in here. Okay.. We don't need to get too crazy in this. We're just going to delete them. Okay, so let's just say we're going through a cleanup and we're going to delete those contacts. Okay, so we can check the progress and see what it's doing. It's going to process those and those should delete in a few seconds. Okay, so we'll come back here and they're gone because we had 100 contacts. Now we're down to 90. So a couple of weeks pass and you come in here and you're like, oh no, I need to get them back. What do I do? What do I do? So there is an option in here, you may not know about this, called Restore. And this will actually show you the contacts that were deleted. And you could go in here and restore them one by one. It's in here. Now, if you have hundreds and thousands of contacts, this may not be the best way to do that. You can go to your Bulk Actions here. So I see that identified that on today I did a bulk delete and I wanna bring them all back. We'll click these Actions button buttons here and click Restore, and that is going to run another action to restore those contacts. Now, like you saw, we only did 10, so it is manageable. But if you're bringing in 1,000, 2,000, 3,000, um, and they're mixed without or within your contacts, you may be wondering, how do I identify who they are? Now, this is still at 90. We're just going to refresh. It takes a little bit for those to come back within the database. So we'll see where we're at with this. All right, so we're still at 90. It's going to take a few seconds, so I'm just going to pause the video here because I want to show you a key way to identify these. Okay, so those 10 are back. We're back to 100. So here's what you're going to do. You're going to go to your bulk actions and you're going to see where the restore one was. We're going to click on show stats and it's going to say that we processed 10 of these. Now you can click on that. So I clicked on the number. Now we did about 1,084 with the client. So we're gonna click on that number and it's going to bring up all those contacts. Now you're going to notice this contact ID here is in that first column. So you can download this. You're going to get the ID, you're going to get the identifier, and you're going to get the status. The ID is really what we want. So we're going to download this. Stay with me. Um, because there's no way to identify those in the contact list. It doesn't show up. It doesn't tag them or anything like that. So we're gonna go back to the contacts under smart list, and we're going to do an import update. So we're gonna go upload that file that we just downloaded. Move myself out of the way here. We're gonna click next. And under ID, we're gonna look for contact ID. We're gonna say don't import the rest of the stuff. Hit next. Under advanced, you're gonna choose update existing contact records. So we're gonna do that. And we're going to say the primary identifier is the contact ID. And now we can go and put a tag on the record. So I would do bulk restore and put in the date. So I'm going to put September 26th because that is the date of today. And make sure you click this add button. If you don't and just click off it, it's not going to add it. So we're going to do that and we're going to say confirm that they have options to contact us. Uh, and we're going to hit submit. And we're going to let it process. So I'll just take a few seconds for that to, to happen. And then once that's done, you should be able to go over here to your filters and pull up that tag for bulk restore. Apply that, and just like that, now you can see those records that you restored.
