Sometimes you need to know when a record you are syncing has been deleted in the external system. Deletion detection works differently depending on whether your sync function is incremental or full β pick the strategy that matches your sync approach.
For incremental syncs, you must actively tell Nango which IDs have been removed. For full syncs (which fetch all records on every run), Nango can compute deletes for you automatically.
Detecting deletes in incremental syncs
When your sync only fetches changed data since the previous run, Nango has no built-in way to know which records disappeared on the provider side.
You must actively tell Nango which IDs have been removed by calling nango.batchDelete() (full reference) inside the sync function.
When can you use this?
You can use nango.batchDelete() if the external API supports one of the following:
- A dedicated βrecently deletedβ endpoint (e.g.
GET /entities/deleted?since=...)
- The ability to filter or sort by a deletion timestamp
- The ability to filter or sort by last-modified timestamp and records include a flag like
is_deleted, archived, etc.
If none of these are available, you cannot detect deletes in an incremental sync. Youβll either need to switch to a full sync or skip deletion detection.
Example
Detecting deletes in full syncs
Sync functions that fetch all records on every run can automatically detect deletions.
Nango detects removals by computing the diff between what existed before trackDeletesStart and what was saved between trackDeletesStart and trackDeletesEnd (full reference).
This works whether your full sync uses checkpoints for resilience or not. If it does, trackDeletesStart should be called before fetching any data and trackDeletesEnd after all records are saved and the checkpoint is cleared.
Example
How the algorithm works
- When
trackDeletesStart is called, Nango marks the beginning of the deletion tracking window for the model.
- Records saved with
batchSave between trackDeletesStart and trackDeletesEnd are tracked.
- When
trackDeletesEnd is called, Nango compares what existed before trackDeletesStart with what was saved in the window.
- Any records missing from the new dataset are marked as deleted (soft delete). They remain accessible from the Nango cache, but with
record._metadata.deleted === true.
Be careful with exception handling when using trackDeletesStart/trackDeletesEndNango only performs deletion detection (the βdiffβ) if a sync run completes successfully without any uncaught exceptions.Exception handling is critical:
- If your sync doesnβt fetch the full dataset between the two calls (e.g. you catch and swallow an exception), Nango will attempt the diff on an incomplete dataset.
- This leads to false positives, where valid records are mistakenly considered deleted.
What You Should DoIf a failure prevents full data retrieval, make sure the sync run fails and trackDeletesEnd is not being called:
- Let exceptions bubble up and interrupt the run.
- If youβre using
try/catch, re-throw exceptions that indicate incomplete data.
How to use trackDeletesStart/trackDeletesEnd safelyIf some records are incorrectly marked as deleted, you can trigger a full resync (via the UI or API) to restore the correct data state.We strongly recommend not performing irreversible destructive actions (like hard-deleting records in your system) based solely on deletions reported by Nango. A full resync should always be able to recover from issues.
Troubleshooting deletion detection issues