Salesforce backup pricing is quote-based rather than list-priced. Salesforce does not publish a rate card for Backup & Recover; its pricing page states that cost varies by customer and that a package is tailored through its sales team. Third-party vendors are more varied, with some publishing per-user rates and others quoting on request. That makes a like-for-like comparison harder than it looks, and it is why understanding the pricing model matters more than chasing a single headline number.
This guide breaks down how Salesforce backup and restore pricing actually works: what drives cost, which pricing models you will encounter, what separates free from paid options, and which line items belong in a realistic total-cost comparison before you sign anything.
How Much Does Salesforce Backup Cost?
There is no single published figure, and any article quoting one should be treated with caution. Here is what is actually knowable.
Salesforce Backup & Recover is quote-based. Salesforce's pricing page says pricing varies based on each customer's individual needs and that its sales team tailors a package to your requirements. Review sites reflect the same thing: major software marketplaces list no entry-level price for the product. Continuous Data Protection is a separate add-on on top of Backup & Recover, so if you need it, it is a distinct line item rather than an included feature.
The Own acquisition changed the landscape. In September 2024 Salesforce acquired Own Company, formerly OwnBackup, for $1.9 billion. Own had been the most widely deployed third-party Salesforce backup vendor, so a large share of what used to be the leading third-party option is now first-party. Own's pricing page now directs customers to Salesforce for pricing across the Own from Salesforce products, including the FedRAMP Authorized version of Backup & Recover. If you are comparing a Salesforce quote against an Own quote, you may effectively be comparing two Salesforce products.
Third-party pricing varies widely by model. Published third-party figures range from a few dollars per user per month to five- and six-figure annual contracts priced on storage volume. Those numbers move frequently, so treat any figure you find in an article, including this one, as a starting point for a conversation rather than a quote. Always confirm current pricing on the vendor's own page.
The practical takeaway: you cannot shortlist on price alone, because most vendors will not give you a price until they know your data volume, user count, retention requirements, and recovery expectations. What you can do is understand the cost drivers well enough to ask for the right quote and compare quotes fairly.
What Determines Salesforce Backup and Restore Pricing?
Six factors account for most of the variation between quotes.
- Data volume. The total size of the data being protected is the single largest driver in storage-based models, and it grows every year whether or not you plan for it.
- User count. Per-user models scale with licensed Salesforce users, which means cost tracks headcount rather than the amount of data at risk. That can favor data-heavy organizations with small teams and penalize the reverse.
- Backup frequency. Daily backups cost less than high-frequency or continuous protection. Continuous Data Protection is typically a separate add-on rather than a default.
- Retention period. Longer retention means more stored copies. Regulated organizations holding seven or ten years of history pay materially more than those holding ninety days.
- Metadata coverage. Some solutions back up records only. Metadata backup, covering custom objects, automations, and configuration, is sometimes a higher tier. This matters more than buyers expect, because restoring data without its metadata is often impossible.
- Restore and sandbox seeding. Check whether restores are unlimited or metered, and whether sandbox seeding is included. These are common sources of unexpected cost after the contract is signed.
Calculating Total Cost of Ownership
License fee is rarely the whole number. A workable formula for annual total cost looks like this:
Annual total cost = license or subscription fee + storage charges + implementation and onboarding + administrative time + restore and support charges + renewal escalation
A worked example makes the gap visible. Take a mid-sized organization with 200 Salesforce users and 500 GB of data on a per-user plan. The subscription might be the only figure that appears in the initial quote, but the real annual cost also absorbs a one-time implementation effort amortized across the term, several hours a month of administrator time monitoring backup jobs and handling restore requests, any per-restore or premium support charges, and a renewal increase that is often specified in the contract at a few percent per year. In practice, the line items outside the subscription commonly add a meaningful percentage on top of it.
Before signing, ask for every item below in writing. Quotes that omit them are not comparable to quotes that include them.
Salesforce Backup Pricing Models Explained
Vendors price in a handful of recognizable ways. Knowing which model you are looking at tells you how the cost will behave as your org grows, which matters more over a three-year term than the opening figure.
The mismatch to watch for is between how you are charged and where your risk actually sits. An organization with 40 users and several terabytes of data will be badly served by a per-user model in one direction and a per-GB model in the other. Map the model to your own profile before comparing headline rates.
Free vs. Paid Salesforce Backup Options
Salesforce includes free export tooling, and it is worth being precise about what it does and does not do. The Data Export Service produces scheduled CSV exports of your records. It is genuinely useful, and it is not a backup solution in the sense most buyers mean: exports are flat, relationships and metadata are not preserved, scheduling is limited to weekly or monthly depending on edition, and there is no restore function at all. Getting data back in means rebuilding it yourself.
Paid options, whether Salesforce's own or third-party, add the things that make recovery viable: automated scheduling, metadata coverage, point-in-time and granular restore, and audit reporting. Automated backup and restore is the dividing line, because a copy of your data that you cannot restore quickly is a compliance artifact rather than a recovery plan.
What is Salesforce Backup
Salesforce Backup refers to creating a secure, restorable copy of the data stored within your Salesforce environment. It protects organizations against data loss caused by human error, cyberattacks, system failures, or accidental overwrites.
Salesforce offers native options including Backup & Recover, the weekly export service, and the Data Export Service. These have limitations, which is a primary reason businesses evaluate third-party solutions offering automated backups, granular recovery, and compliance support.
Key Features of Salesforce Backup
Salesforce Backup tools offer capabilities that keep your data secure, recoverable, and compliant. Here is what to look for.
1. Automated Backups
Automated backups protect data and metadata without manual intervention, running on a daily, weekly, or custom schedule. They reduce the risk of human error and ensure consistency, which matters because the most common backup failure is simply that nobody ran one.
2. Cloud and On-Premise Storage Options
Flexible storage lets you choose between cloud infrastructure such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, and on-premise storage where you want tighter control. The right choice depends on your data residency obligations and internal security policy as much as on cost.
3. Version History and Snapshots
Version history lets you keep multiple backup versions, track changes over time, and revert when needed. Continuous or scheduled snapshots support audits and data integrity by documenting system changes, and they are what make point-in-time restore possible.
4. Metadata Backup
Salesforce metadata, including custom objects, automations, validation rules, and configurations, is as essential to protect as the records themselves. Not all solutions fully support metadata backup and recovery, so verify this capability explicitly. Restoring data without its metadata frequently does not work.
5. Granular Recovery
Granular recovery lets you restore specific records, fields, or objects without disturbing unrelated data. This targeted approach minimizes downtime and avoids the collateral damage that comes from rolling back an entire environment to fix one problem.
6. Data Encryption
Backup tools use encryption such as AES-256 to protect information in transit and at rest, supporting security requirements under frameworks including GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC 2. Ask whether you can bring your own encryption keys if key control matters to your compliance posture.
7. Point-in-Time Recovery
Point-in-time recovery restores data exactly as it existed at a specific moment. This is what you need when addressing an accidental deletion, an overwrite, or a bad integration write that ran for hours before anyone noticed.
8. Compliance and Audit Reporting
Audit and compliance reports document backup and recovery activity, showing who accessed, restored, or modified backup data and when. That transparency is what auditors ask for, and assembling it manually after the fact is painful.
9. Data Comparison and Validation
Comparing backup data against current Salesforce data surfaces discrepancies introduced during transfers, backups, or recovery. Validation confirms your backups are complete and usable, which is the difference between having a backup and having a backup that works.
10. Integration with Salesforce APIs
Integration with Salesforce APIs keeps data handling compatible as the platform evolves across its three annual releases, so backup processes do not break when new features ship.
Salesforce Backup Alternatives
Beyond Salesforce's own products, several third-party vendors serve the Salesforce backup market. Pricing across these changes often, so the summaries below describe each vendor's pricing model and point to its live pricing page rather than quoting figures that may already be out of date.
1. SysCloud
SysCloud provides automated, API-based daily backups for Salesforce with no minimum billing requirement, covering new records and custom objects automatically. It offers granular point-in-time restoration with metadata recovery options and unlimited storage.
Pricing model: published per-user annual pricing. Confirm current rates on the SysCloud pricing page. It rates well on major review sites, with users citing straightforward setup and self-service restores.
2. Keepit
Keepit is a cloud backup service supporting Salesforce alongside Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. It provides automated daily Salesforce backups including metadata, strong encryption, and multiple backup copies stored across locations, with regional hosting options that help with data residency requirements.
Pricing model: quote-based. Contact Keepit through its pricing page. Reviewers highlight the regional hosting and the ability to download data in usable formats independent of the source system.
3. CloudAlly
CloudAlly backs up Salesforce alongside Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox, and Box. It offers automated backups with on-demand recovery, AES 256-bit encryption, and adherence to ISO 27001, HIPAA, and GDPR standards, plus data comparison and sandbox seeding.
Pricing model: published per-user pricing with monthly and annual options, and discounts for non-profits and larger deployments. Confirm current rates on the CloudAlly pricing page.
4. Skyvia Backup and Restore
Skyvia combines cloud data integration with backup for Salesforce and other cloud applications. It provides daily automated backups, encrypted storage, and monitoring and restoration tooling across CRM, accounting, marketing, and e-commerce systems.
Pricing model: tiered plans including a free tier, with paid tiers scaling by capability and volume. Confirm current tiers on the Skyvia pricing page.
Benefits of using Salesforce Backup
- Data protection: safeguards against loss from accidental deletion, system failure, or cyberattack.
- Compliance support: regular backups help meet data retention obligations and provide evidence during audits.
- Faster recovery: backups let you restore lost data quickly, limiting downtime and operational disruption.
- Customizable coverage: scope and schedule can be tailored to how your data actually changes rather than a fixed default.
- Operational confidence: a tested backup removes the scenario where a single mistake becomes an existential problem.
Challenges with Salesforce Backup
Despite the benefits, Salesforce backup solutions carry real challenges:
- Cost. Backup can be expensive at scale, particularly for organizations with large data volumes or long retention requirements.
- Implementation complexity. Setup and ongoing maintenance require technical attention to configure and monitor properly.
- Data redundancy. Without planning, backups accumulate redundant copies, creating storage inefficiency and unnecessary cost.
- Backup gaps. Incorrect scheduling or silent job failures leave holes in protection that are only discovered when a restore is attempted.
- Recovery time. Restoring large datasets takes time, and recovery speed is frequently the metric buyers evaluate least and regret most.
How to Select the Right Salesforce Backup Solution
Four criteria separate solutions that work under pressure from those that only look good in a demo.
- Evaluate comprehensive backup capabilities. Confirm the solution backs up data, metadata, and configurations. Many focus on records and skip metadata, which undermines recovery.
- Assess recovery speed and flexibility. Look for point-in-time recovery, granular restore of individual records or fields, and full recovery. Ask for realistic recovery time estimates against data volumes like yours.
- Ensure secure storage and compliance. Require encryption in transit and at rest, and confirm the provider meets the standards your industry demands.
- Check integration and ease of use. Complex setups produce configuration errors. Favor intuitive scheduling, clear monitoring, and clean Salesforce integration.
Why Choose Flosum for Salesforce Backup?
Flosum’s purpose-built-for-Salesforce Backup and Archive addresses the gaps left by native tooling, which does not automatically back up or archive your customizations, integrations, reports, records, files, or custom code. Flosum provides secure, automated, and on-demand backups supporting regulatory requirements including GDPR and CCPA.
- Granular backup and restoration. Choose traditional, complete, or incremental backups, and restore only the specific objects, records, and fields you need, which matters when isolating corrupted data.
- Point-in-time recovery and compliance support. Restore from any point, with support for requirements such as data residency.
- Efficiency. Composite Backup captures new, changed, and deleted data and combines it with existing backup data, reducing backup windows and recovery time compared with repeated full exports.
- Predictable pricing. Flosum prices with clear upfront terms, which addresses the renewal escalation and surprise-charge problem that surfaces repeatedly in this category.
Choose a Salesforce Backup Plan Based on Total Cost
Salesforce backup pricing rarely comes down to a published rate, because most of this market quotes rather than lists. That makes the comparison work fall to you.
The decision comes down to three questions. Does the model match your profile, so you are not paying per user when your risk is measured in terabytes, or per gigabyte when your risk is a large team making frequent changes? Does the quote cover metadata, restores, and sandbox seeding, or are those separate line items that will surface later? And can the solution actually restore your data at the speed your business needs, tested rather than assumed?
Answer those three and the shortlist usually resolves itself. If you want to see what granular, designed-for-Salesforce backup and recovery looks like against your own org's profile, schedule a demo and we will walk through the numbers with you.
