When Salesforce goes down or important records vanish, you lose data, time, and revenue. Most teams assume their cloud provider has it covered, but Salesforce doesn’t automatically back up your data in a way that supports fast, reliable recovery.
A strong backup and disaster recovery strategy protects your records, and it keeps your business moving when outages, accidental deletions, or ransomware attacks strike. It helps you meet compliance requirements and maintain customer confidence.
In this guide, we’ll walk through the difference between backup and disaster recovery, what Salesforce’s native tools don’t offer, and how to build a resilient data protection strategy that fits how your organization works.
A Practical Overview of Backup and Disaster Recovery
Backup and disaster recovery serve different purposes. Backup handles your data restoration, while disaster recovery keeps your business running during catastrophic failures.
What Is Data Backup?
Data backup creates point-in-time copies of your data that protect against corruption, accidental deletion, and malicious actions. Backup approaches include:
- Full backups that capture everything
- Incremental backups that save only changes since the last backup
- Differential backups that store changes since the last full backup
Salesforce’s native weekly export service has serious limitations. Weekly frequency means losing up to seven days of work, and the export format doesn’t preserve object relationships or maintain data integrity during restoration. You can learn more in Flosum’s guide to Salesforce backup and disaster recovery.
Salesforce protection requires frequent backups with proper retention policies and version control. You need to restore data while maintaining custom fields, relationships, and metadata configurations.
What Is Disaster Recovery?
Disaster recovery includes infrastructure resilience, failover protocols, and business continuity planning. While backup focuses on data preservation, disaster recovery keeps operations running during full outages, natural disasters, or major security breaches.
Disaster recovery metrics include:
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO): how quickly you need systems operational
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO): how much data loss you can tolerate
If your sales team relies heavily on Salesforce, you might need an RTO under four hours and an RPO under one hour.
How Are Backup and Disaster Recovery Different?
The difference lies in scope and purpose. Backup protects your data, while disaster recovery protects your ability to operate. Together, they form a complete continuity strategy.
If a Salesforce administrator accidentally deletes critical opportunity records, backup solves the problem by restoring those specific records. If Salesforce experiences a major service outage, disaster recovery processes help maintain operations through alternative workflows or rapid failover procedures.
Backup is a central part of disaster recovery, but disaster recovery goes further. It involves planning around people, processes, and technology resilience.
Why You Need Both Backup and Disaster Recovery
Backup and disaster recovery complement each other for complete data protection. Incomplete protection creates measurable business damage:
- Compliance violations when you can't demonstrate complete data recovery capabilities
- Customer churn during extended outages
- Legal exposure when you can't recover audit-required records
- Revenue loss from disrupted sales processes
Consider a mass workflow deletion scenario: your marketing team accidentally deletes automation rules affecting 50,000 leads. With only backups, you recover the data but spend days reconfiguring workflows. With only disaster recovery processes, you restore service quickly but lose critical lead data directly impacting your sales pipeline.
Assess your protection by mapping Salesforce components against business impact. Customer data, opportunity management, and compliance-sensitive information need the strongest protection. Start with these high-impact areas to identify where enhanced backup disaster recovery measures deliver the greatest risk reduction and operational resilience.
How to Improve Your Backup and Disaster Recovery Plan
Follow these tips to boost your backup disaster recovery strategy:
1. Run Regular Testing and Recovery Drills
Test your backup disaster recovery plan and practice recovery procedures quarterly to ensure they work when a crisis hits. Start with partial recovery drills using non-production sandboxes to verify restored data maintains all relationships and field dependencies.
Create realistic scenarios that mirror actual incidents, from accidental bulk deletions to corrupted custom objects. During drills:
- Verify your team can execute recovery procedures efficiently
- Ensure restored records integrate with existing Salesforce configuration
- Document everything: recovery times, data integrity checks, and issues encountered
2. Store Data Offsite and in the Cloud
Implement the 3-2-1 backup strategy: three copies of critical data, stored on two different media types, with at least one copy offsite. Cloud storage enhances this approach by providing geographic redundancy and eliminating single points of failure.
Modern backup solutions offer flexible storage options:
- Provider-managed cloud storage
- Your own cloud infrastructure
- Hybrid approaches that combine on-premises and cloud storage for optimal resilience
3. Automate Backup Schedules
Determine backup frequency based on how quickly your Salesforce data changes and your tolerance for data loss. High-transaction environments need more frequent backups, while less active orgs might operate effectively with weekly schedules.
Automation reduces human error and provides consistent protection by streamlining backup tasks, monitoring, and recovery:
- Set up monitoring and alerting systems that notify you immediately when backup jobs fail
- Implement advanced backup technologies that capture only new, changed, or deleted data
- Reduce backup windows and storage requirements through incremental approaches
4. Secure Every Backup
Protect backup data with the same diligence you apply to production systems:
- Use encryption both in transit and at rest
- Establish role-based access controls
- Maintain comprehensive audit logs of all backup and recovery activities
Consider compliance requirements for your backed-up data, such as GDPR, HIPAA, or industry-specific regulations. Features like bring-your-own-key encryption and granular access controls help support compliance objectives while maintaining security best practices.
How to Choose the Right Backup Plan and Disaster Recovery Solution
Start with three core questions: What's your acceptable data loss window? How quickly must you restore operations? What compliance requirements govern your data? These answers directly impact which solutions will work for your Salesforce environment.
Assess your current risk exposure across different scenarios:
- Accidental deletions
- Ransomware attacks
- Extended outages
- Configuration errors.
Each requires different recovery capabilities. Map these scenarios to RTO and RPO requirements for different parts of your Salesforce org. Sales data might need hourly backups with 15-minute recovery windows, while historical analytics could tolerate daily snapshots.
On-Premises vs. Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery
On-premises solutions give you control over data location and security protocols. You'll handle encryption keys, access controls, and compliance auditing directly. The trade-off is upfront infrastructure costs and ongoing maintenance expertise requirements.
Cloud-based approaches eliminate capital expenditure and provide automatic scaling as your data grows. Updates and security patches happen without your intervention. The dependency is that internet connectivity becomes non-negotiable, and you're trusting a third-party provider with your data.
Hybrid approaches often work best for Salesforce environments:
- Keep recent backups locally for rapid recovery of common issues like deleted records
- Use cloud storage for long-term retention and geographic redundancy
- Balance control and convenience based on your team's capabilities
Important Features for Enterprises
For enterprise Salesforce environments, look for solutions offering:
- Configurable snapshot frequencies that match actual data change patterns
- Comprehensive metadata handling that preserves Salesforce relationships
- Native Salesforce integration to eliminate transformation headaches
- Granular recovery capabilities for individual records, fields, or objects
- Immutable backup storage to prevent ransomware corruption
- Multi-region replication for geographic diversity
How Flosum Solves Salesforce Backup Challenges Others Can’t
Most backup solutions weren’t built for Salesforce. They struggle with metadata, custom objects, and nested data relationships. That creates compatibility issues and extra manual work.
Flosum’s 100% native backup and archive solution eliminates these issues. It integrates directly with your environment, eliminates transformation errors and preserves every relationship and dependency.
Our Composite Backup technology captures only new, changed, or deleted data between snapshots. That shrinks backup windows by up to 80% and lowers storage costs, while maintaining data integrity.
Even large Salesforce orgs with high volumes of transactions can stay protected without long delays.
Flosum also supports:
- Granular recovery of specific records, fields, or objects without touching unrelated data
- Selective restoration when a workflow accidentally updates thousands of records but only a few need fixing
- Full compliance alignment, including FedRAMP, GDPR, and HIPAA, with BYOK encryption and role-based access
- Flexible storage options: you can use Flosum’s cloud, your infrastructure, or a hybrid setup, to stay in control of data residency
With Flosum, you get faster backups, cleaner restores, and a platform that fits how Salesforce works.
Assess Your Salesforce Backup Disaster Recovery Strategy
Businesses rely on Salesforce data, but many leaders don't realize Salesforce doesn't automatically backup important information. Without proper protection, you risk losing:
- Customizations and integrations
- Reports and dashboards
- Critical business records
- Custom code and configurations
Conduct a protection audit of your current Salesforce setup. Document your backup frequency, recovery testing schedule, and actual vs. required RTO/RPO metrics. Identify which business-critical processes lack adequate coverage and calculate the real cost of downtime for each.
Note that Salesforce's recycle bin retains deleted records for only 15 days, with a limited capacity. Their data recovery service costs $10,000 per request, takes weeks, and offers no guarantee of complete recovery.
Flosum's native backup and disaster recovery solutions address Salesforce's specific protection challenges with Composite Backup technology and granular restoration capabilities. These align your protection strategy with business requirements rather than forcing compromises.
Ready to protect your Salesforce org? Schedule a demo or explore our full backup and recovery platform on AppExchange.
