Why Backup & Restore

A backup and restore strategy for your Salesforce instances is something which a number of organizations gloss over, because it seems like an unlikely black swan event and one which could be mitigated. However, it is crucial to have a solution in place given the importance of Salesforce within most IT business systems landscape. Compliance for SOC2, ISO and SOX necessitates being prepared for such an event. Accidental deletion is still the top cause of data loss.

Why Salesforce Backup

Given the crowded space of third party Salesforce backup solution providers, where does the Salesforce Backup solution fit in? This article Introducing Salesforce Backup: Your Data’s Safety Net provides a good overview of the justification for implementing Salesforce Backup and a high level overview of features.

The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

Here is what I found to be the most impressive about the solution. These are big selling points, especially for small and nimble teams.

• Extremely easy to setup, get up and running in under 30 minutes
• Configuring and scheduling backups is extremely easy and very intuitive.
• Backups, restore and export operations have a very reasonable performance, within medium sized org (few records take seconds, GB’s of files take 20 minutes for the initial backup).
• The export feature is great when more control is required.
• Including all file types is as easy as one click.
• Full comparison per record is very powerful.
• Clearly shows you which object records are read only, can be backed up but not restored.

• Very limited controls to search across records for restore, both in the restore system and then within the results which come back. For example, there is no general search through filters or SOQL, and UX controls do not allow you to sort by columns.
• Can only restore by one top level object at a time, although nested related records can be selected.
• Object with auto name fields are hard to decipher for restore as no other fields show up on the default view.
• This one could also be considered a benefit as it increases ease of usability, but it could be limiting in certain situations – all fields are automatically backed up and there is no controls to exclude/include individual fields.
• Files are not automatically restored, can only be restored manually
• This is a general problem within the Salesforce platform and is not specific to this solution, but as in almost any instance, restoration of certain object records will hit custom flows, validation and other errors such as invalid users being owners.
• Once a date range for files is selected, it can only be moved out and not up, which seems counter intuitive.

Tips

• Although it is very easy to setup, take the time to plan our your backup and restore strategy, including all relevant stake holders. Document the plan as well as procedures. Make sure the relevant team is trained and kept updated. The last thing you want to be doing is learning how to operate this during a critical incident in production.
• The solution can and should be tested in a sandbox first.
• Once a date range for files is set to All Time, it cannot be changed. Consider this carefully.
• Date range is required and can span any time period.
• This help page Troubleshoot Salesforce Backup has a great list of common errors and how to resolve them.
• No backup happens on records which had no change, so their backup date is not incremented on each backup job run.
• Backup Date field value is misleading for a delete, because that is actually the date of when the backup picked up that the record was deleted, not when it was last backed up.
• If a deleted record is in a recycle bin, it will be undeleted on restore.
• Restore for a deleted record will only restore the latest backed up version and you can no longer see the version history for that record. Once restored, the version history starts over.
• Restore shows record version history (unless deleted).
• On demand delta backup can be delayed and inconsistent. Sometimes picks up changes right away, sometimes not. Must run some time after a change to pickup the changes. Only relevant for testing.

Ongoing Maintenance

Consider including the following as part of your governance and change management strategy to ensure the backup & restore solution is maintained.

1. When a new managed package is installed and implemented, consider whether some or all of the managed object should be added to the backup and restore. Test and validate.
2. Also when you add a new local custom object.
3. Run a backup job before any major deployment with risk of data impact.
4. Re-test the restore procedure regularly, at least annually, but ideally quarterly.
5. Keep all documentation, procedures updated and team members trained.
6. Keep the Salesforce Backup managed package updated as well as Salesforce has new releases. Test it in a sandbox first before rolling out to production.

Takeaways