In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, businesses depend heavily on CRM platforms like HubSpot to manage customer relationships, deals, and data integrity. However, even the most reliable systems can encounter glitches. One such incident involved HubSpot unexpectedly deleting custom deal properties after a subscription sync error—a scenario that caught many companies off guard and forced urgent data recovery efforts.
TL;DR: A subscription synchronization error in HubSpot led to the automatic deletion of custom deal properties across multiple accounts. The issue was tied to how the sync handled outdated or unmatched property definitions. A custom import mapping script was implemented to retrieve lost CRM data from backup exports. This situation underscores the importance of regular backups and custom error handling logic in CRM integrations.
What Happened: The Unexpected Data Loss
In early 2024, several HubSpot users noticed something alarming: their custom deal properties—fields that held vital deal-specific information—had vanished across the platform. Upon investigation, HubSpot engineering teams identified the root cause: a malfunction that occurred during a subscription sync event. This sync was intended to align a client instance with a development or sandbox environment, but an unexpected mismatch led to data destruction instead of data merging.
The Core Issue: Subscription Sync Error
The glitch was traced back to a failed property mapping resolution during a routine sync between multiple environments. HubSpot allows a development sandbox to sync properties with a production subscription. Unfortunately, in this case, the script mistook unmatched property IDs from the production environment as obsolete definitions. As a result, rather than preserving them, the sync logic marked these properties for deletion to “clean” outdated mappings.
This issue primarily affected:
- Custom deal properties added manually by admins
- Fields tracked by third-party integrations, custom objects, or APIs
- Properties without explicit mapping in the destination environment
Immediate Impact on CRMs
The deletion cascade affected thousands of deal records. Sales teams across various companies reported missing fields in their deal views and filtering systems. In some instances, automation workflows and sales sequences failed entirely due to references to now-deleted properties. The sudden change also destabilized integrated external tools that relied on these deal attributes for downstream operations.
The damage was not due to intentional user error but rather due to a breakdown in the backend mapping logic during synchronization—a rare but catastrophic misfire in the HubSpot cloud environment.
HubSpot’s Response
HubSpot’s technical support team responded by halting all sync-based property deletions globally. They then focused on identifying the accounts that were affected and began restoring default property schemas. However, full restoration of deleted properties—especially with their original values—was not possible without backups.
The Recovery: Import Mapping Script
For teams with recent data exports or audit logs, a recovery option still existed. Developers created a custom import mapping script using HubSpot’s crm.properties API and batch update endpoints. This script allowed users to:
- Scan previously exported CSV files containing deal property names and values
- Match each deleted property with its backup counterpart in the export
- Recreate missing properties in the HubSpot UI with the same labels, field types, and value options
- Batch re-import the values back into their corresponding deals
Script Features
The script was fully customizable, written primarily in Python, and made use of HubSpot’s API rate-limiting awareness. Some additional features included:
- Support for both dropdown and text fields
- Logging skipped deals (deals that had errors or missing IDs)
- Automatic property creation with metadata definitions (e.g., field type, internal name)
- Email alerts for batches that failed due to API rate limits or timeouts
Lessons Learned and Best Practices
The incident served as a crucial reminder of the fragile nature of CRM customizations and the importance of sync safeguards. Moving forward, businesses using HubSpot or any other CRM with sandbox syncing should practice the following precautions:
- Regular Backups: Automate exports of custom object data and properties.
- Environment Parity Checks: Audit property definitions between environments before syncing.
- Manual Sync Preview: Request a preview of changes before deployment in live environments.
- Test Sync Scripts: If using custom sync logic, run with logging and rollback guards.
How Companies Are Preventing Future Occurrences
Many organizations reevaluated their sync permissions and implemented secondary approval flows internally. HubSpot itself has promised improvements in its sandbox sync diagnostics, including previews of deletion impacts. Additionally, new alerts are being tested to notify admins whenever properties are deleted during automated syncs.
Going forward, more data-rich organizations are building proprietary sync managers to sit between their environments and HubSpot, adding logic gates and content-diffing tools before any sync is applied. These solutions often borrow strategies from DevOps (like Git diffing) to assess what is actually changing before it takes effect.
FAQ: Understanding the HubSpot Custom Deal Property Loss
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Q: Why were custom properties deleted in the first place?
A: A sync between environments mistakenly treated unmatched properties as obsolete, triggering a deletion protocol. -
Q: Could HubSpot restore the deleted data?
A: They could restore basic property definitions, but the original user-entered values required manual or scripted re-import from backup data. -
Q: Is this likely to happen again?
A: HubSpot is updating its sync engine to prevent such incidents. However, it is always recommended to perform backups before major operations. -
Q: How can I check if my CRM was affected?
A: Go to “Properties” under “Settings” in your account and look for any unexpected deletions or missing fields in your Deal object. Audit your change logs if enabled. -
Q: Where can I find the recovery script?
A: Several community developers have shared versions on GitHub. Be sure to adjust it to your environment and test in sandbox before deploying live.
In summary, while the accidental deletion of custom deal properties in HubSpot was a rare but serious issue, it highlighted the ongoing need for robust infrastructure practices, development-stage error catching, and the value of accessible backups. With the right tools and a little foresight, companies were able to bounce back—and now have stronger systems in place because of it.