What is Salesforce Backup and Restore?
Salesforce Backup and Restore, earlier known as Data Recovery Service, is a paid service to help customers recover their lost data and can be useful for customers who don’t have an alternative backup strategy.
This service enables customers to create backup copies of Salesforce data natively, 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.
Salesforce 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.
How Does Salesforce Backup Data?
Salesforce keeps a backup copy of your data to support its disaster recovery plan (i.e., in case of failure on their part). However, Salesforce explicitly recommends using a third-party solution in the event of data loss.
Salesforce also provides a few native backup options to restore your data at no additional cost. These options include:
- Data Export Service: With this service, you can perform manual or scheduled .CSV exports of your data weekly or monthly using the Salesforce UI.
- Data Loader: This application allows you to perform mass data operations, like import, export, or delete, in Salesforce. While this gives you greater control over the data you are importing/exporting, the process is manual and can be time-consuming.
- Report Export: This method is one of the simplest ways to export your Salesforce data via the reports interface manually.
- Recycle Bin: You can retrieve accidentally deleted data from the recycle bin for 15 days. After 15 days, the data will be permanently deleted.
What are the Limitations of Using Salesforce Backup and Recovery Solution?
- There’s no guarantee that 100% of your data will be recovered
- The recovery process can take up to six to eight weeks to complete after you raise the support request
- The recovered files don’t include metadata
- Data deleted more than three months ago is not recoverable unless a third-party backup solution is used
- The recovered data is sent to you in CSV files, which requires you to manually re-upload (after resolving import errors) into Salesforce
- The service costs $10,000 per recovery
Is Salesforce Backup and Restore Enterprise Ready?
At its debut, it is good enough for organizations that aren’t heavily reliant on Salesforce, but it’s not ready for the scale and demands of enterprises.
Salesforce Backup and Restore has limitations that make it unsuitable for enterprise customers. For one, it stores the backup copies in a separate data center from the primary system, but they are regionally co-located, so an outage in that region will disable both the backup and the primary system. Most importantly, the backups are only taken daily. Most enterprises want backups of mission-critical data to be no older than 15 minutes.
Essentially, it’s baseline recovery. Sure, it’s a start, but if you use Salesforce as a mission-critical application, this won’t cut it as a complete disaster recovery service.
There’s No Substitute for Dedicated Data Protection
Even with the recent reinstatement, Salesforce still recommends third-party solutions for complete data protection. For Salesforce customers, dedicated solutions pick up where native tools leave off – offering robust backup, long-term retention, and granular restoration capabilities to safeguard Cloud data from deletion, corruption, and attack.
Here’s how dedicated protection stands apart:
- Performance: Dedicated solutions offer purpose-built protection. They are designed to automate backups, retain data in isolated/immutable locations, and recover data at a moment’s notice – optimizing how businesses deliver business continuity. While Salesforce Backup and Restore provides basic controls for data recovery, it is costly and takes a long time to complete. Salesforce’s data export options are manual and labor-intensive.
- Control: Today’s admins and IT professionals require control and autonomy. While Salesforce offers a feature-rich and highly available platform, it does not deliver the thorough backup and recovery capabilities admins demand. Dedicated solutions extend beyond native capabilities to help users protect, preserve, and rapidly recover data with ease. Admins benefit from self-service options, immutable backup copies separate from source data, sandbox seeding for accelerated development and testing, rapid data recovery controls, granular restores, and more.
- Ease of Use: Administrators, architects, and developers solicit tools that make their life easier. Whether granularly restoring records, populating sandbox environments, or protecting multiple production orgs, they need data protection that doesn’t feel cumbersome. With dedicated solutions, today’s businesses get the confidence to know their data is always secure, available, and recoverable – without hassle.
- Coverage: Data protection doesn’t just end with Salesforce. Businesses need complete coverage across endpoints, SaaS apps, on-prem, and cloud environments. Industry-leading backup and recovery solutions can secure the entire organization for complete end-to-end protection through a single pane of glass.
Why Customers Choose Relational Junction:
Sesame Software’s data management solution, Relational Junction, provides comprehensive backup and recovery that minimizes data loss, supports regulatory compliance, and builds business resiliency. Relational Junction’s key benefits include:
Simple implementation: With Relational Junction, it takes only minutes from the time you log in to the time you start your first backup. Although we have an excellent support team available to help whenever needed, most customers can expect to be self-sufficient.
Independent application: Data is backed up outside of Salesforce, which means if Salesforce goes down, customers still have access to all of their data.
Automated backups: Relational Junction is an entirely automated system that removes the burden of backups. Once customers configure the solution to backup an environment, Relational Junction takes care of the rest.
Backup retention: With Relational Junction, data is backed up throughout the day and is always available for fast point-in-time, granular restoration – whether it’s one record, a complex hierarchy of data, or the whole org. Relational Junction performs an incremental backup of Salesforce data throughout the day – not just once a day – and keeps every record’s version at the time of synchronization. Data is stored in a secure relational database, not flat files.
Finally, but perhaps most importantly, Relational Junction helps customers attain Recovery Time Objectives. By backing up Salesforce data and attachments daily, Relational Junction minimizes the amount of data your organization will lose, as well as the time it will take to recover.
Protecting Salesforce data and applications may seem overwhelming, but you don’t have to do it alone. Sesame Software is here to help! Take the first step towards complete data protection and start your free trial today!
Author:
Crystal Duarte
Chief Sales and Marketing Officer, Sesame Software