The Data Restoration Issue

If you’ve worked as a Salesforce consultant or were responsible for implementing Salesforce for your company, you’ve at some point been asked “How do we handle data backup and restoration?” Until now, answering that question required due diligence on third-party solutions or implementing a long and tedious manual process to restore records from the Salesforce weekly data export or another export tool. And as customers recognize the importance of metadata backup for mishaps in the configuration that can affect productivity and compliance, this too required often a separate third-party solution or clunky manual process.

Now ensuring your company can recover from data and metadata mishaps can be accomplished with ease using Salesforce’s new Backup & Restore product. As an IT professional, you’ll be able to easily configure data and metadata backup for your Salesforce instance in an intuitive interface that’s native to Salesforce, and easily recover those backups with a granular level of control. 

As more and more critical business data moves into the cloud, businesses need to ensure they have a means of recovering from system issues, human error, and cyber-attacks,  and Salesforce has now made that easier than ever. So let’s dive in and see how it works!

Backup Management

The Salesforce Backup & Restore product allows system administrators to set up backups on a scheduled recurring basis or ad hoc as needed. You can schedule backups as frequently as daily and have the ability to select which standard and custom objects, as well as metadata and attachments, to include. The backup logs allow you to see when backups were initiated and by whom, how much data has been backed up, and to configure how long the backup should be retained. 

Restoration

One of the most exciting features of the new Backup & Restore product is the ease of and control over the restoration process. When an issue arises, you’ll be able to select which backup to restore from and select not only which objects to restore but drill down to view changes to and select individual records. Say a user overwrites the email of a key business contact Whether you need to restore data that was lost across multiple records from a systems integration mishap or recover a key bit of information that was overwritten by user error on a single record, the restoration process is just a matter of clicks and minutes away.

With the Backup & Restore product, you can choose the backup you want and the data & metadata objects to restore, but the granularity of your control over the process doesn’t stop there. The interface then allows you to drill down and compare the backup to the current state to see which records were deleted or updated, the delta comparison between new and old records. You can now easily find information on individual records that’s been lost, and select them individually. The restore also provides the option of including child records in the restoration, so mistaken deletes can be restored in full. 

Whether your data has suffered massive corruption due to an integration gone haywire or one specific client relationship is threatened due to a user mistake, the restoration process is straightforward and fast.

Regulatory Compliance

When Salesforce developed the Backup & Recovery tool, they worked with customers to understand the many internal and regulatory data storage compliance rules that IT staff are tasked to meet. You can configure different levels of access to the backup data and tools for different users, review summaries of the backups for auditing purposes and even remove data from individual records in backups to adhere to the right to be forgotten (RTBF) requests. And you can rest assured that backups are stored in a physically separated data store on Amazon Web Services and are encrypted in transit and at rest. 

Closing Thoughts

With the new Salesforce Backup & Recover product, Salesforce has removed all the complexities and time-consuming aspects of disaster recovery and customers now have the ease of mind of knowing that recovery is always just a few clicks away.