Deduptio

Survivor & field rules

Your match rule decides which recordsare duplicates. Two more settings on the same page decide what a merge does with them: which record survives, and what happens to the field values on the records that don't. Both are set per object, and both are saved with the rule.

Survivor

The survivor is the record that remains in Attio after the merge. Deduptio proposes one for every group using this setting:

  • Oldest record — the earliest created. The default, and usually right: the oldest record is the one your integrations, reports and links already point at.
  • Newest record — the most recently created. Useful when the newest record came from an enrichment or import you trust more than your history.
  • Most complete record — the one with the most filled-in attributes.

This is only a proposal. Every group on the Duplicates page shows a radio button per member marked — keep, so you can override the survivor for that one group without touching the rule.

Field conflicts

Once the survivor is picked, the merge decides what to do with values the other records carry. This is the setting most worth understanding before a large cleanup, because two of the four options can overwrite a value the survivor already had:

  • Survivor wins— the survivor's record is authoritative. Nothing is copied from the other records, not even into fields the survivor left empty. Only associations move. Nothing on the survivor can change.
  • Fill only empty fields — copy a value only where the survivor has none. Never overwrites. The safe way to gain data from a duplicate.
  • Most recent value — the most recently created record's value wins, overwriting the survivor's.
  • Longest value — the longest value wins, overwriting the survivor's. Longest is a rough proxy for “most detailed”; it is a heuristic, not a judgement of quality.

Survivor wins and Fill only empty fields cannot destroy data on the survivor. Most recent value and Longest value can. If you are unsure, start with Fill only empty fields.

Seeing the decision before it runs

You never have to take this on trust. Review mergeon any group runs a dry run and lists every field that would be copied onto the survivor, which record it would come from, and the reason it won — “survivor had no value”, “most recent record's value”, and so on. Dry runs are read-only and are never counted against your merge limit.

Attributes Attio computes or protects — created date, interaction counts, formulas — are excluded from field decisions entirely, so they never appear in a preview.

Telling the records apart

Each member of a group is summarised using the fields that differ between the members, which is what makes two near-identical records distinguishable at a glance. Every member also shows its created date, a shortened record ID, and a View in Attio ↗ link if you want to look at the full record before choosing.