Salesforce has its own Data Backup Service, which was once terminated in July 2020, and then they reintroduced it again in March 2021. This was reinstated with the advice of the Salesforce community as it had been considered a credibility factor to have a backup service as the last resource if the users are left with no other options of data recovery.
Salesforce endorses the partner services for data backup to get timely and reliable data backup over time. However, Salesforce itself announced that this is not the ideal option for data backup and recovery. This article will first discuss some of the major advantages of these third-party data backup services.
Benefits of third-party data backup services
1.Lowered risk
Daily backup with automation will enable you to keep up with the data changes on Salesforce, which took place daily. The rate of change may be high as the users can update the customer info, lead information, closure of leads, and various other activities every day. As a study shows, with about 26000 data changes each day, 155,000 instances of data loss can happen between taking weekly exports. So, a third-party Salesforce data backup application can save such a huge number of data instances in case of any data interruption than the weekly backup service offered by Salesforce.
2. Lesser effort
With the use of third-party data backup tools, which enable automation, you may just set and forget it. This requires only much lesser effort when compared to the Weekly Export, which is a manual process. The admins need to spend a lot of time accomplishing this task, which, when automated, can be fully taken care of by the system itself. Since the major projects and the daily needs of the same, most of the admin’s tasks can be taken by the occasional emergencies, and it can also be missed out of the 48-hour window for downloading the weekly exports they need to do. This can also be consistent with what they are hearing from the Salesforce admins. Irrespective of the organization’s size, you can handle any volume. This is why you need a tool that can work in[app to back up the data automatically. It can also restore anything you need in case of data loss.
3. Lesser cost
The Salesforce data volume you need to store online for the backup may grow very quickly. Every day you tend to add more customer information, contacts, supporting documents, reports, proposals, and a lot more. Ultimately, in case of backup and restoration, it will require many admins to monitor and manage the data exports and be more costly in terms of the storage capacity needed. This is more so in the case of native Salesforce backup. However, the cloud-based third-party storage infrastructure can significantly reduce the cost of data backup. You can rely on the cloud-to-cloud daily backup with ultimate storage to provide a lesser-cost alternative.
In the case of third-party backup, there are many other unique benefits too in terms of handline Salesforce data; you can easily make the data backup process automatic, which can be run daily, with in-app restore of data and metadata. There are also many customization options available in terms of data backup and restoration.
Best practices to follow in data restoration
As we have seen above, it will cost you a minimum of $10K in the case of Salesforce Data Restore services. You can easily avoid paying this with the help of third-party tools by following some data backup best practices. For this, first, you need to have an automated daily backup process in place, which can quickly and easily restore the data from any point in time. Along with data, you need to take care of metadata too. Weekly Export offered by Salesforce is not so effective to meet such demands. As you plan for the best alternatives for the Salesforce backup services, you should also consider following best practices. Here are some suggestions from the expert members of the Salesforce community:
- While choosing a Salesforce data backup service, you need to look for solutions that have in-app options and ease of use. You may not like to augment the Weekly Export of Salesforce with something more complex. Look for options that you can set and forget to run in the background.
- Ensure that the data backup app you choose offers in-app restoration of the data lost. Standard backup solutions are useless if these do not allow you to restore the data lost quickly. You should be able to accomplish the restoration from any point in the past as you want.
- While choosing the backup and restoration apps, always check for the users’ feedback and reviews on the AppExchange.
- Leverage the exposure and experience of those in the Salesforce community for long, including the MVPs. You can easily spot the MVPs by engaging with the User Groups of Salesforce near you. Suppose you are not so active in Salesforce Success Community. In that case, you may try to slowly be active and interact with the MVPs in your region to find better ways to handle the Salesforce backup than relying solely on the Weekly Export manual option.
- While thinking of a data backup, always try to spot a backup solution that can transparently and proactively notify you about any challenges in the backup either through instant messaging, Chatter, or email. You can also get such alerts through Salesforce1 on your mobile. In any case, you may not want to find out such problems only while you try to restore the data lost.
The data you have on Salesforce is very valuable and critical in terms of your business operations. As it is subject to various types of damages and losses, being a Salesforce organization owner, you must protect this data and ensure availability of it anytime. You may be able to do an automatic daily backup of this data to rely on the credibility of the data and be confident about the possibility of restoration.