The Backfill feature allows administrators to initiate the backfill of historical data from In Vivo to Benchling, providing greater control and visibility into the process. With this feature enabled, administrators can select specific date ranges, review the number of items to be synced, monitor backfill progress in real time, and cancel backfill operations if needed, all directly from the In Vivo tenant.
This helps ensure that historical data remains consistent across systems, especially after integration updates or sync issues.
This feature is in Limited Availability (LA) and is not enabled by default. It is only available to customers upon request and may be subject to change. For more about what it means for features to be in LA, see our article that describes the Benchling release stages.
1. Enable the Feature
Contact support@benchling.com to request this feature to be enabled on your Benching In Vivo Tenant.
2. Initiate a Backfill
- Navigate to the Integrations section in Manage team
- Go to the Benching Sync section where the backfill option is available.
- Click Run Backfill.
- Select the Date Range for which you want to backfill historical data.
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Only items created or updated between the from and to dates will be included in the backfill. If you want all of the measurements for a specific study make such to set the study start date and the From date, the To date could be set to today to cover all data.
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3. Review Item types and studies
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You can restrict the backfill to only include the selected item types and review the number of these items that will be backfilled across all studies.
Note: If measurements, samples, observations or Dosages are are backfilled before the study or animals have been synced to benching, the events will fail due to missing parent item, if this happens repeat the backfill with the study and animal items also selected.
- You can also restrict the backfill to individual studies (default is set to backfill all studies) Simply
search studies by either study code or name to apply the backfill to only these selected studies.
4. Start the Backfill
- Click Save.
- A row has been added to the top of the backfill table with the number of Items syncing under "in progress"
- During this time a new backfill cannot be initiated.
5. Monitor Progress
- Refresh or revisit the Benchling Sync page at any time to monitor real-time progress.
- You can view in progress (remaining), completed, and failed items by clicking into the backfill to show a detailed activity page for each backfill.
- All failed events will show an error message that will instruct the admin regarding how to resolve this issues.
- Once resolved these failed events can be selected and a bulk action to retry sync events applied.
6. Cancel a Backfill (If Needed)
- If you need to stop the backfill, click Cancel Backfill from the action menu to the right of the relevant row.
- Confirm that you want to cancel.
- Cancelling will halt any remaining unprocessed entities and clean up the active backfill job.
Important Notes
- Permission: Before running a backfill, ensure that the In Vivo Sync app has write access to all projects and folders that the studies are being synced into.
- Rate Limits: Backfills are designed to respect Benchling’s API rate limits and will progress steadily without affecting real-time sync operations.
- Partial Backfills: If only a subset of measurements needs syncing, carefully choose appropriate date ranges to avoid unnecessary data transfer.