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.

Choosing a winner field by field

The field rule picks one way to resolve every conflict on the object at once. Sometimes that's not what one particular field needs — one record has the good phone number, another has the right job title. Any row in the preview where the group's records actually hold different values gets a picker beneath the field name, listing every record's value labelled by which record it came from. Pick one and it wins for that field alone, overriding whatever the field rule would otherwise have done — including forcing the survivor's own value to stay even if the rule would have overwritten it.

A field where every record agrees, or where only one record has a value at all, has nothing to choose between and shows no picker — there is no decision to make. Picking a different value updates the Before/After table immediately — no re-run needed — including the append case: picking a value for a field that allows multiple entries adds it to what the survivor already has rather than replacing it, and the preview shows that outcome the moment you pick, not just after confirming. Picking a value does not merge anything by itself; that only happens when you hit Confirm merge. Relationship rules (what happens to list memberships, tasks, notes and incoming references) work differently: those settings genuinely change what the server would do, so changing one after the preview loaded does block Confirm merge until you re-run Review merge.

Fields that point at another record

A field can hold a link to another record — a person's company, a deal's primary contact. If a merge-all run merges that linkedrecord too, the link the preview captured now names a record Attio has replaced, because Attio's merge gives the merged result a new record ID. Deduptio resolves those links to the record that replaced them before writing, so merging companies and people in the same run keeps the people pointing at the right company. A link Attio has already re-pointed itself is left alone rather than written again.

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.