Admin’s Guide to Salesforce Backup

1. Why back up Salesforce?

• Human error – accidental deletion/overwriting of data

  A Stanford study revealed that over 88% of data breaches are caused by human errors. Salesforce tools such as data loader make it easy to import large amounts of data that are vulnerable to accidental deletion or modification. Moreover, having too many people with administrator permissions can lead to data loss that may go unnoticed for days or weeks. A backup of critical data ensures smooth recovery of such deleted/overwritten data.

• Scheduled/unplanned maintenance

  Salesforce schedules systematic maintenance windows to continuously enhance their application for customers. During the maintenance, a major chunk of organization data becomes unavailable to use. Having a backup serves as a bulwark against such scheduled or sudden maintenance, so that your business continuity is not affected.

• Malicious activity 

  A Clark School study has revealed that hackers attack computers every 39 seconds on average. The Salesforce ecosystem contains plenty of confidential information and it is essential to have a backup and recovery plan in place to protect your data from cyberattacks. 

  Malicious activity is not limited to external attackers. Disgruntled employees within a company may tamper with confidential information. This makes it even more important to have a backup of critical data. 

• Salesforce outage 

  In May 2019, Salesforce users suffered an incident that later came to be known as ‘Permageddon.’ Salesforce teams that had integrated Pardot, a marketing automation tool, found that their permissions models were corrupted and that all users were granted permissions to modify all organization data. As a result, Salesforce had to block access to its entire database for about 15 hours. Businesses affected by the outage lost precious time and critical Salesforce data, all of which could have been avoided if they had a backup solution in place. 

2. What happens when you delete Salesforce data?

2.1. Limitations of the Salesforce recycle bin

• Versioning: You cannot restore previous versions of the record. In other words, if a user accidentally overwrites data before deleting it, they will only be able to recover the latest, modified version of the record. 

• Time crunch: Deleted data is only available for 15 days after the date of deletion, beyond which it is permanently deleted.  

• Metadata lost: Reports, customizations, and other metadata are not stored, and cannot be recovered. They must be recreated from scratch in case of accidental modification/deletion. 

• Object relationships not intact: Salesforce clearly mentions that the restores only apply to lookup relationships that have not been replaced.

3. How can you back up Salesforce data?

3.1. Salesforce backup using Data Export Service

3.1.1 Required editions and user permissions

3.1.2. How to backup Salesforce data using the Data Export Service

3.1.3. Limitations of Salesforce backup using Data Export Service

• Formula and roll-up summary fields cannot be exported using the Data Export Service. 

• The exported files will only be available for 48 hours after the email has been sent.   

• Weekly export is not available in the Professional and Developer Editions of Salesforce. 

• The Data Export Service isn't supported in sandboxes.  

• Heavy Salesforce traffic can delay export delivery. Sometimes, your first request will still be in the queue when your next request is made, as specified in the Salesforce Help document. 

• There is no option to select specific records to be exported. All the records of a particular object will be exported, thus increasing the size of the export.  

• There is no option to select specific fields to be exported. All the fields of a selected object will be exported.  

• The weekly export can only run once a week, not daily or hourly. This means you will lose up to seven days' worth of data - that was changed or deleted in between backups. 

• If the size of data in the org is greater than 512 MB, the export generates multiple .zip files instead of a single .zip file. 

3.2. Salesforce backup using Report Export

3.2.1. Required editions and user permissions

3.2.2. How to back up Salesforce data using the Report Export service

3.2.3. Limitations of Salesforce backup using Report Export

• Each user can only export up to 5 reports at once.  

• When exporting a report in Lightning Experience as Formatted Report or .xlsx Details Only, you can export only up to 100,000 rows and 100 columns.  

• If a report takes 10 minutes or more to export, the export times out and fails. As a workaround, create a copy of the report, filter both reports so that they each return half the data of the original, and then export each report.  

• Historical trending reports cannot be exported.  

• Joined reports can include a maximum of 2000 rows and are available for export only as Formatted Report. 

3.3. Salesforce backup using Full copy sandbox

3.3.1. Required editions and user permissions

3.3.2. How to back up Salesforce data using a full copy sandbox?

3.3.3. Limitations of Salesforce data backup using a full copy sandbox

• You need to manually refresh a sandbox, and the old version is gone once you refresh it.

• Sandboxes refreshes can take days, or even weeks to complete, depending on the size of the org. 

• Full copy sandboxes can only be refreshed every 29 days. Anything new created in between is not backed up. 

• Metadata restore is not possible via the fully copy sandboxes. 

• Full copy sandboxes are quite expensive because they are complete replicas of the production org. 

• Full copy sandboxes are not available in the Professional Edition of Salesforce. 

• Restoring data from the full copy sandbox to the production environment must be done manually and is a hassle.  

• It is difficult to identify data loss as full copy sandboxes do not have any compare or discovery tools.  

3.4. Salesforce backup using Data Loader

3.4.1. Required editions and user permissions

3.4.2. How to back up Salesforce data using Data Loader

3.4.3. Limitations of Salesforce backup using Data Loader

• Needs to be installed separately on your system. 

• Does not support export of attachments. 

• Data Loader can only produce output in CSV formats. 

• It takes multiple steps and a lot of time to complete the migration process. 

• Restoring data with object relationships intact is difficult. 

3.5. Salesforce New Native Backup and Restore

3.5.1. Why choose third-party cloud backup tools over Salesforce Backup and Restore?

• Having a backup solution built within the platform is risky.

  • There are significant drawbacks to using a backup solution built within the platform you are backing up. Even though Salesforce segregates the storage of backup data from production data, your point of data access is still the same - the Salesforce platform. 

  • Using a native backup solution means you will not be able to access your backups in the event of a Salesforce outage. 

  • Having the backup copy on the same platform also means a malicious user with access to the data in your Salesforce org can easily access your backup data as well. 

  • Backup centers are also regionally co-located, so an outage in that region will disable both the backup and production data. 

  • There is no option to download or export the backup data and move it out of the Salesforce environment. 

• Backups are only taken daily.

  Most enterprises want backups of their business-critical data to be no older than 15 minutes, according to Christopher Bertrand, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group.

• It is easier to integrate Salesforce backup into an existing backup architecture.

  If an organization is already using a third-party cloud backup solution, then it makes sense to use that vendor’s backup software for Salesforce as well, rather than using the native Salesforce backup tool. This way, administrators can manage backups for all the clouds from a single console. 

• Backing up your data is a third-party cloud backup vendor’s primary business, which means they will work diligently to make sure your backups and restores are working perfectly. On the other hand, Salesforce is not a backup company, and while the backup tool integrated into the Salesforce platform will likely work as advertised, users prefer to use a dedicated backup solution since it offers greater capabilities.

3.6. AppExchange and third-party backup tools