Salesforce Download Backup
Francisca Revelo
I am looking for a new backup solution for my Salesforce org. Other than OwnBackup, are there any that you would recommend looking at? I love OwnBackup but the cost doesn't work for a business as small as ours.
Salesforce user licenses can fluctuate often since employees move in and out of an organization. It is a best practice to provide yourself with a small buffer between the exact number of used licenses and the total amount of licenses within an organization. Plus, as a data protection best practice, it is recommended that you license Salesforce backup software for the total number of Salesforce licenses, not just the total number of used Salesforce licenses.
Data backup and restore is often considered a security topic. While this topic is indeed the first step to set up a disaster recovery plan, the technical challenges raised share common grounds with data migration, rollback strategy, sandbox data initialization or even continuous integration.
Salesforce performs real-time replication to disk at each data center, and near real-time data replication between the production data center and the disaster recovery center. However, there are many different reasons why a customer would like to organize their own backup of information from Salesforce. We could mention for example:
When choosing a backup method, you should also consider whether you want to use Salesforce native features (Weekly Data Export, Data Loader), build your own solution leveraging APIs, or use a dedicated AppExchange app. There are pros and cons to all of these, so consider the following factors:
Security
Any local backup should be properly guarded against security risks, which might involve encryption of local data or other security measures. When choosing a backup method, keep the following factors in mind to ensure your backup data is secure.
Customization and automation
Some scenarios might require the ability to change specific ways the backup process works. Using Salesforce APIs gives you fine-grain control over the entire backup process. If the following factors are important for your backup process, consider a solution that provides maximum flexibility, like using Salesforce APIs.
Ideally a backup should give a representation of the data at a certain point in time. However, while the backup is being performed, Salesforce data can be modified by users. The longer the backup process lasts, the more discrepancies you might get at the end of the process.
A backup of 9 million records containing less than ten fields (boolean and audit fields) even reached the impressive speed of 16.5M/h per unit of parallelization, which gives a theoretical speed of 577 million records per hour with a degree of parallelization of 35. Salesforce platform definitely has one foot in the future!
Backup speed regarding the files (Base64 fields) can vary a lot depending on the size of the files. It is much faster to backup one file of 2GB (2.6GB per hour) than 2,000,000 files of 1KB (600MB per hour).
Especially in the context of file/Base64 backups, defining a retry policy (failure or corruption detection, incremental/fixed interval/exponential backoff pattern) will play an important role in your backup strategy.
Sovan Bin is a Salesforce Certified Technical Architect and the CEO and Founder of odaseva.com, an AppExchange enterprise software provider based in both San Francisco and Paris, addressing the challenges of Salesforce data recovery (backup & restore) and release management (metadata comparison, sandbox initialization & data quality). He has been providing innovative solutions regarding Salesforce platform governance, security and performance since 2006.
In 2022 Salesforce introduced its own, native Backup & Restore service. Since it is generally a good idea to have a third-party backup provider for increased data security, Salesforce Backup & Restore is not included on the list below.
A full sandbox is a 100% mirror of the production instance holding both data and metadata. It costs extra and can be only refreshed every six weeks. Typically, it is used by organizations doing a lot of Salesforce development or testing large data migrations, however it can be used as a backup tool as well.
This is a good option when a RDBMS system is already in place (along with backup). These solutions do not back-up metadata (except for customized object fields) so it has to be backed up separately, e.g., by a development team.
Customize backup settings and license management gives administrators the control they need. Spanning alerts administrators to any problems with their backups so that they can be corrected quickly. Plus, our Audit Log shows a full view of activity history so administrators can see how others have used the application.
Set retention policies and delete individual records for compliance with data protection laws. Or if you need to render all of your backup data unusable, just delete your unique master encryption key.
Protect your metadata from unwanted changes or unexpected incidents with the most comprehensive Salesforce backup solution. Back up and restore your metadata with our cutting-edge deployment engine in a matter of clicks.
At the CRM platform vendor's annual Dreamforce event this week, Salesforce revealed its upcoming Backup and Restore service. The new service enables customers to natively create backup copies of Salesforce data, set retention policies for those copies, restore the data back into Salesforce organizations and audit who is using these functions. All backup data is encrypted at rest and in transit.
Backup and Restore automatically creates daily backup copies of Salesforce data that are regionally co-located with the primary copies. Aimed at Salesforce administrators rather than an organization's IT departments, its interface is designed to allow all its functions to be carried out through clicks and automation.
Salesforce had a native data restoration service called Data Recovery Service, which it retired July 31, 2020. Recovery via this service took six to eight weeks, cost a flat fee of $10,000, and did not guarantee that all data would be restored. The vendor said it shut the service down because it did not meet its quality standards. Salesforce restored the service in March and hinted it would be releasing a new native backup and restore service later.
Since then, Salesforce has been advocating the use of third-party backup vendors for customers looking to protect their Salesforce data. However, the number of customers requesting a native backup feature for Salesforce has grown recently, said Marla Hay, vice president of product management at Salesforce. Salesforce worked with these customers to co-design Backup and Restore to ensure it met customer needs better than Data Recovery Service did.
Salesforce Backup and Restore has limitations that make it unsuitable for enterprise customers, Bertrand said. It can't perform analytics on the backup data, it stores the backups in the same place as the primary, customers can't download a backup copy or otherwise move it out of the Salesforce environment and, most importantly, the backups are only taken daily. Most enterprises want backups of mission-critical data to be no older than 15 minutes, he explained.
Salesforce did not indicate that it partnered with a third-party data protection vendor to develop Backup and Restore, so it's impressive it developed a release-ready product only a year after shutting down its previous attempt at native backup and recovery, Bertrand said.
This product could either be the beginning of a more robust set of native data protection capabilities, or simply placating customer demand for a native backup option -- and it's too early to see what Salesforce will do with it, Bertrand said.
Update: Following publication, a Salesforce spokesperson contacted SearchDataBackup with clarification on what Salesforce Backup and Restore can do when it becomes generally available. Customers will be able to run analytics on the backup data in the feature's interface itself and via Salesforce's native analytics tools. Salesforce also clarified that backup copies are stored in a separate data center from the primary system. They are, however, regionally co-located, so an outage in that region will disable both the backup and primary.
Backups no older than 15 minutes are also possible, as the frequency of backups is "limited only by the amount of time a backup takes to complete," Salesforce claimed. The spokesperson did not specify how constant backups might impact cost or performance. Backup and Restore will also be able to perform incremental backups and enable customers to download backup copies, but these two features aren't guaranteed to be available at launch, the spokesperson said.
Salesforce does maintain back up data and can recover it, it's important to regularly back up your data locally so that you have the ability restore it to avoid relying on Salesforce backups to recover your data. The recovery process is time consuming and resource intensive and typically involves an additional fee. To avoid recovery fees and be able to recover your data whenever needed, you can use the following backup and recovery methods.
Most of the solutions available only do backups but does not help you with restore .For metadata backup ANT tool along with force.com migration tool along with CI solutions like Autorabit , Circle or Jenkins can be build .
The best "out of the box" solution is the weekly backup service, but it only backs up data, and only once per week. Otherwise, you could use the Data Loader, a mirroring service, or one of the apps on the AppExchange. If you wanted to cobble everything together yourself, a combination of the Data Loader and the Metadata Toolkit could be scripted to perform backups of both configuration and data.
My organization uses Backupify from Datto for this (link here). This is a cloud-based solution that backs up both data and metadata. We've been running it for almost a year. Our database is about 10GB; infrequently, our backup does not complete on schedule. Backupify does catch up in these cases. I'd recommend asking someone from Backupify if they can manage the 1TB of data you have.
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