Think You Can’t Lose Your Salesforce Data? Think Again.

Salesforce is the leading customer relationship management (CRM) system worldwide. More than 88 of the Fortune 100 use at least one app from the CRM giant and at least 150,000 companies manage their customer data through it. This data is extremely valuable to its clients, and protecting it should be every company’s priority.

Performing backups of said data is a necessary step for companies of every size. Previously, If a company had a catastrophic loss, Salesforce offered a paid data restore service to help mitigate this loss. But as of July 31, 2020, this is no longer an option for Salesforce customers.

No More Data Recovery from Salesforce?

Salesforce has stopped providing data recovery services as of July 2020. Salesforce has a high standard for service and support they provide customers. With data recovery, they weren’t able to achieve these standards. Their data recovery would take 6-8 months and couldn’t guarantee a 100% recovery. This responsibility now falls on each customer directly. 

But Salesforce is a Cloud Service – How Can Data Disappear?

While Salesforce is cloud-based, its data can be compromised,. Here are a few ways:

• By accident: One natural issue is plain old human error. Someone with the wrong keys to the wrong system could jeopardize months or years of data without realizing it. It’s pretty tough to fat-finger a complete data wipe, but people find a way.
• Internal process troubles: If some staff use uploads and downloads to manage information, they could overwrite new data with no way to recover it. Likewise, teams in separate departments can incidentally overwrite changes without realizing they’re entering over top of each other, and salespeople on the road can overwrite data from their mobile app. Weak workflows and protocols exacerbate this.
• Hackers: Salesforce works continuously on its security protocols. However, absolutely no internet-connected anyone is 100% safe from hacking. 
• Malfunctions: Tech issues on your side or Salesforce’s can compromise data integrity.
• Software Development: Developing new software features can delete objects or fields from Salesforce if not properly implemented.

With all the risks to your company’s data, file backups are mandatory to ensure your information is secure and recoverable. 

How to Back Up Your Salesforce Data

To back up your company’s information, you have two choices: do it yourself or work with a third party.

DIY Backups

Salesforce offers a few ways to initiate a backup manually. Dataloader,  Data Exports, and Report exports are three methods to extract all or part of your data ad hoc. The Data Export Wizard lets you schedule a weekly or monthly export, which you have 48 hours to pull before it disappears. 

If you’re working with a tight budget or a small team, this might work fine. Otherwise, you may want to bring in the experts.

Third-Party Expertise

Salesforce readily recommends you employ a specialized third party for backups and restores. Look for data retention firms that offer full and incremental backups, and make sure that all your meta-data is backed up as well. Also, pay attention that you can restore either partial or complete data sets in the event of corruption or loss. 

It’s all about Relationships

While manually backing up or exporting your data may sound sufficient, it is important to understand that weekly exports are essentially a download of each object into a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet has the IDs of related records, but when you restore Salesforce creates new IDs and you have to manually repair these by importing each object one by one. The more complex the Salesforce instance the longer it will take to recover. 

CRMNinjas’ partner SFApex offers a complete back & restore service that will get your data back quickly and painlessly. With SFApex, all the data is backed up into an AWS S3 bucket. You have the option to store it with SFApex or use your own. With SFApex, your entire Salesforce suite is backed up. You can set backups as frequently as every 15 minutes or stay with the default of a daily backup. When you do have to restore your data, you can pinpoint the moment to which you’d like to revert. You can restore a few records or entire objects. The app will automatically maintain all relationships as it restores the records.  The system uses Salesforce IDs to eliminate duplicates, so you can maintain trust and reliability in your data. It also allows for ad hoc backups, which are invaluable before large deployments or other large-scale updates. Plus, the partnership between SFApex and CRMNinja lets you work with us to customize your entire Salesforce experience and trust that your information is accurate and safe.

Learn more about SFApex here.