Salesforce dominates the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) services business due to the practical solutions it has created to manage customer and partner data, accounting for 33% of market share as of 2024 and boasting an enormous customer base that showcases its formidable capabilities. Unfortunately, as their user count grows, so does the need for secure data.
However, CRMs that store your data only sometimes offer adequate protection - data loss and extra layers of security threats exist. User errors can happen at any point, while most SaaS providers focus on providing great platforms while leaving security models and management up to their customers.
At Salesforce, installing means managing and protecting your organization's and customer/partner's data, which may seem like a substantial undertaking. We want to simplify things here by providing an in-depth guide to backup/restore functions to assist with managing Salesforce more efficiently - let's get going.
Why Do You Need Salesforce Backup And Recovery?
There are various potential sources of data loss within any organization, ranging from data center failures and power outages to natural disasters or human mistakes - not to mention mistakes on the human part. Reducing business efficiency by eliminating data is no small matter. Modern organizations depend on data to support team collaboration, business decisions and client relations while complying with data retention requirements for specific industries.
Data loss can have severe ramifications on daily operations or, worse still, lead to financial and legal consequences for companies of any kind, damaging reputation and finances in equal measures. By having an established salesforce data security backups policy in place, in case data is lost, you'll quickly restore systems online to resume regular business practices without delay.
What Needs To Be Backed Up?
At Salesforce, it is imperative to identify what data should be protected for recovery purposes and implement effective daily backup solutions capable of doing just this. Efficient Salesforce demand backup solutions should cover all your essential data types - custom field object level records, files, and content should all be secured alongside basic types such as contact records. Insufficient protection means losing custom configurations, fields, page layouts, and metadata backup at risk in Salesforce unless these comprehensive backup solutions accommodate that.
Common Data Loss Scenarios In Salesforce
There are multi-factor authentication scenarios in which Salesforce data could become lost - either purposely or accidentally - which a third-party backup solutions and recovery solution could address:
- User-Driven: Users may need to realize why accessing specific data leads to its deletion; similarly, corporations often cannot reconcile employee modifications before leaving. Users often assume deleted things can be restored from their Recycle Bin without considering that Recycle Bins only store item version histories.
- Administrator-Driven Errors: Unlike previous cases, admin-driven errors result in more considerable data losses that require an elaborate recovery strategy. Salesforce Data Loader is typically to blame here - its application allows anyone with access to conduct bulk updates, modifications and actions at once, making mass deletion possible and, therefore, leading to most such incidents.
Users may only sometimes realize when and what data they accidentally deleted in Data Loader. When power users delete thousands of records by mistake, they will remain in the Recycle Bin for up to 14 days before being restored piecemeal from within that Bin to regain them. This process takes much more time than expected.
Salesforce Data Backup Solutions
The salesforce data security best practices and protection options are critical to business continuity ensuring smooth operations across customer relationship management, sales, marketing activities and data restoration activities. Salesforce native backup options, as well as its subscription data backup policy and restoration service, help reduce security risks of data loss.
Native Backup Tools:
Data Export Service
- Pros: Automated backup is ideal for protecting photos, documents, attachments and Chatter files that change quickly over time - you can set an automatic or manual schedule depending on how frequently your backups need to occur.
- Cons: Sandboxes do not support data export, with files deleted 48 hours post-export completion. Furthermore, delays should also be expected in congested areas.
Export A Report
- Pros: Export/Import can help incremental backup specific data sets such as Campaign Contacts or Lead Records by exporting and then importing into another Salesforce environment or third-party solution such as Excel.
- Cons: Manual, labor-intensive processes subject to human errors make automation more necessary.
Salesforce APIs
- Pros: Salesforce APIs allow external applications to back up Salesforce data using an API connection.
- Cons: While more comprehensive solutions may offer access to Salesforce backup and restore functions for metadata and specific setups, other solutions might provide even greater assistance in protecting them.
Native Restoration Tools:
Recycle Bin
- Pros: Recycle Bin enables easy retrieval of soft-deleted records such as parent accounts, cases and custom lookups that were soft-deleted through soft delete operations. As documents can take up to 25 times your MB storage capacity for retrieval, items are kept for 15 days before being permanently erased.
- Cons: Once deleted, these can't be recovered for a limited period. However, Recycle Bin can help recover soft-deleted data.
Data Import Wizard
- Pros: The Data Import Wizard simplifies importing Salesforce objects such as accounts, leads and custom objects; up to 50,000 records may be imported simultaneously using this process.
- Cons: Unfortunately, this option offers few ways of recovering vital data; instead, it focuses on updating and editing existing records.
7 Tips For Planning Salesforce Data Backup And Restore
Establish A Recovery Point Objective
Salesforce data backup and restore strategies aim to restore systems to operational status following data loss events, though their goals differ for everyone. Establishing an RPO helps determine individual requirements and goals when setting your backup/restore strategy - it indicates how much data your firm will tolerate losing should something go amiss.
An RPO that requires more frequent backups requires increased storage space; on the other hand, an extended RPO requires less expensive storage but will result in more significant data loss after recovering and restoring from an event of data loss.
Define A Recovery Time Objective
As part of your data backup settings decision-making, another factor you must remember when setting them is how critical it is for your firm to resume operations quickly after any data disaster strikes. Recovery Time Objective (RTO) measures the turnaround period between when an incident happens and when normal business operations can resume. An RTO of 24 hours or less means your system can return online quickly, saving money through reduced downtime costs. Unfortunately, their operational expenses will likely rise accordingly due to the increased focus and memory requirements required to maintain such systems.
Select A Type Of Backup
No two businesses require identical Salesforce data backup and restore techniques; each will have unique requirements depending on its objectives and individual needs, leading to varied solutions for safeguarding their information. Selecting an effective data backup can reduce storage requirements while providing the necessary protection.
Configure Your Settings
Specifications can be entered into data backup and restore tools to meet your coverage and storage requirements more closely. Depending on the selected vendor, this could occur through Salesforce or directly within their agency. Correct settings will specify which data sets must be covered to avoid being stuck with outdated critical information.
Select the data and metadata to be backed up, bearing in mind any applicable government restrictions that govern which data types need to be covered in backup copies. Backup data should also have a retention period set; with longer retention times, you will need to keep more and more files. Short retention periods indicate that data may be deleted while you still need it, so ensure it fits your requirements.
Consider Archiving Certain Data Sets
Archiving can also reduce the size and cost of backups by compressing large volumes of information into manageable backup sets. Data archiving refers to identifying outdated information, removing it from production systems and keeping it for long-term storage.
Archiving can often be confused with data backup. Backups provide copies that do not affect original files. At the same time, archives serve as repositories for non-critical information that must be kept. Lacking this data does not compromise Salesforce environments' proper operation; on the contrary, its absence improves it by lessening server workload and simplifying the backup of essential information.
Keep Regulations In Mind
Healthcare and financial services industries are highly regulated. Various standards regulate how these sectors must store, handle, and preserve any sensitive data they hold; healthcare, in particular, requires extensive regulation.
Businesses aiming to comply with regulatory regulations regarding the management of sensitive information should invest in a dedicated Salesforce data backup and restore tool. It will allow companies to stay compliant while protecting sensitive information securely. Data Backup & Recovery supports GDPR's right to be forgotten law with an automated security feature designed to erase personal information when no longer necessary for its initial purpose.
Institute A Reliable Restore Functionality
Salesforce backup functionality comes in various flavors. Salesforce offers backup capability but lacks the tools needed to restore data when an incident of data loss arises. You must ensure you have this capacity; backup data without access to live environments will provide no tangible advantages or returns on your investments.
Conclusion
According to an analysis, Spanning should be the default choice for set-and-forget Salesforce data backup. From start to finish, this native Salesforce software is straightforward for everyone in your organization to use, boasting intuitive design features and seamless Salesforce integration. As users realize more use cases are met through this technology solution, more use cases may surface throughout your organization - providing insights that uncover needs you weren't even aware of.
Now, we will make one last suggestion for your next steps: check out Spanning during their limited-time deal. While we have stressed the significance of this tool multiple times throughout this review, once you put your hands on it, you will discover even more insights than were presented here. Salesforce data backup recovery services are weeks away; if there is a better time to look at data backup alternatives, when is it?
