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How to Back Up Your Salesforce Data?

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Backing your Salesforce data is essential to maintain data integrity and ensure business continuity. However, the process can become chaotic without the proper methods and tools, leading to unnecessary delays and putting your business at risk of permanent data loss.

This guide'll show you how to back up your Salesforce data effectively, making your work more efficient and less stressful.

Does Salesforce Backup My Data?

The short answer is yes but with limitations.

Salesforce stores your data in a safe location, but backups are not automatic. You must opt for manual or paid backup services. 

While these services help with your data backup, they also come with some limitations, like:

  • Limited restoration capabilities: All Salesforce files may not be restored from backups. Some files, such as attachments or metadata, may be missed.
  • Slow recovery process: The backup and data recovery process is slow and time-consuming. It can take up to 6-8 weeks to retrieve your data.
  • Incomplete backups: They don't include a backup of metadata, attachments, and other vital components.

Salesforce backup services often require extra effort to complete a backup of your entire data without missing any elements.

Native Salesforce Backup Solutions

Salesforce offers a range of powerful native tools to back up your data and metadata. Choosing the right tool is crucial to ensuring your data backup and recovery strategy is effective and reliable. With each option offering unique features and limitations, we'll guide you through the options to help you select the best solution for a seamless, efficient backup process that safeguards your business continuity.

The data backup ideally focuses on backing up the main business data. Here are the tools to back up your data in Salesforce.

Salesforce Backup:

Formerly known as the Backup and Restore managed package, it is now an improved version offering a comprehensive data backup solution. That allows you to schedule your backups for data and your metadata.

This is a paid Salesforce solution, but it has certain limitations regarding the ability to obtain specific reports. 

Report Export: 

This method offers a simple way to export your data from the reports interface. You can export your Salesforce data into a spreadsheet, .xls, or .csv file. The Report Export method is suitable for quick and manual exports of report data.

Data Export Service: 

You can manually back up your data weekly or monthly or schedule the export via the UI. Your data is exported into a comma-separated value (CSV) file set.

However, note that you can only backup files once every 7 or 29 days. In case of heavy traffic, there is a chance of delay, which can cause data loss and create confusion within the system.

Data Loader: 

This tool allows you to export data from the Data Loader using an API. Here, you must follow the manual steps to get the data, which are more complicated and time-consuming. However, Data Loader is ideal for large data exports since it can handle complex queries for specific datasets.

Metadata Backup

Metadata is key to keeping your data organized and presentable. To ensure complete backup, you must back up your data and metadata separately. Salesforce offers different sets of tools to back up the metadata, such as:  

Change Sets

You can use change sets to transfer metadata from one Salesforce org to another. However, change sets can only be sent to two orgs affiliated with a production org.

It is important to remember that Salesforce does not have a roll-back feature, meaning You can't undo changes once they are made. So, you need to be extra careful while taking the metadata backup. 

Sandbox Refresh

Salesforce sandbox copies your metadata from your production to a sandbox org. 

What type of data gets copied depends on the sandbox type since they offer several different sandboxes. This is an ideal way to take backup without affecting your production environment, but a full sandbox can be refreshed only once every 29 days, which means the chances of missing out on data during that time are high.

Preferred Way to Back Up Your Salesforce Data

Opting for a third-party Salesforce backup solution like Flosum will eliminate manual effort by offering an automated backup process. It simplifies DevOps by offering data and metadata backup, enabling seamless protection and recovery for your Salesforce environment.

Flosum goes beyond the traditional approach. It retrieves new, changed, and deleted data from Salesforce and merges it with the existing data, keeping a complete record of both new and old data.  

Additionally, Flosum offers: 

  • Spend no time in manual steps as you can automatically backup and restore your data
  • Run a template-based partial backup to work flexibly with critical data
  • Reduce the Salesforce storage usage and improve its performance 

The best part of using Flosum Backup & Archive is that Salesforce downtime is kept to a minimum, and the secure off-site backup brings a layer of security to your data.

With Flosum, you can save 30% or more with a complete and automated backup solution. Book a consultation to know more. 

Salesforce Data Backup: Which Method to Pick?

With two options to backup your Salesforce data: native Salesforce backup solutions or a third-party Salesforce backup solution, which one should you pick? 

Here is the comparison table to determine the best solution for you.

Aspects Native Salesforce Solution Third-party Solution (Flosum)
Easy to use Need manual efforts, can get time-consuming and hectic Takes automatic backups, extremely user-friendly
Customization Minimal flexibility while selecting data subsets for backup Fully customizable with templates for partial or full backups
Deleted Data Recovery No support in case of deleted data recovery Easily tracks and restores deleted data
Technical knowledge Need for technical experts to carry out the backup No need for technical expertise
Error Management High chance of error with a tedious process of data restoration Minimum chances of error with a quick restoration process

While the third-party solution comes with a cost, it is more cost-effective in the long run than the efforts required to implement the native method. The risk of losing data is much higher in the native approach, and any kind of data loss truly hurts. 

Frequently Asked Questions

1. How do I backup data in Salesforce?

You can use Salesforce native tools like Data Export Service or Data Loader. Alternatively, opt for a third-party backup solution like Folsum for an automated backup.

2. How do I backup all metadata in Salesforce?

To back up all your metadata in Salesforce, use Flosum's third-party solution, which allows you to back up both your data and metadata seamlessly, offering an alternative or complement to Salesforce's native tools

3. How do you take a backup of your data?

You can either manually separate your data and metadata for backup, or choose Flosum for a seamless, stress-free backup solution.

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