Did you know the average enterprise uses 991 applications to support its operations? Salesforce, the leading platform for customer relationship management (CRM) and customer service, has become integral to enterprise business operations. Salesforce data drives customer experiences, boosts sales productivity, and personalizes marketing efforts.
As companies rely more on Salesforce data, the risk of losing that data—whether from accidental deletions, ransomware, or system failures—becomes much higher. The absence of a comprehensive Salesforce backup strategy could lead to business disruption, downtime, and financial loss, underscoring the urgency and importance of this topic.
While Salesforce offers its backup solutions, they have some limitations. However, the availability of third-party backup solutions provides a confident alternative. In combination with these solutions, adopting best practices for Salesforce backup helps businesses ensure their data is fully protected and can be quickly recovered if anything goes wrong.
Let’s look at the best practices for Salesforce backup to ensure data security and business continuity.
12 Best Practices for Salesforce Backup
With tools like the Data Loader, it is easy for users to delete or update records accidentally. Administrators or users with advanced permissions can inadvertently change your configuration settings, such as adding or deleting custom fields, deleting or changing reports and dashboards, etc. A robust Salesforce backup strategy ensures you can safeguard critical business data from loss, corruption, or accidental deletion. It enables your organization to recover quickly by restoring data during a breach and maintaining business continuity.
1. Define the Data Backup Scope
Your Salesforce data includes records, custom objects, files, content, and metadata, such as custom objects, configurations, and workflows. Therefore, it's essential to decide which information to include in backups. Your Salesforce backup should include data and metadata for a complete recovery in a failure. Therefore, you should consider a backup solution that offers comprehensive cover rather than the native options that do not support metadata backup.
2. Implement a Data Retention Policy
Data retention refers to how long the data will remain in the backup. In simpler terms, it's about managing data across its lifecycle, from when it's created and imported to when it's deleted or archived. A clear data retention policy is crucial for optimizing storage costs and ensuring you only keep the data you need.
Here are the core components of a Salesforce data retention policy:
- creating a data catalog
- analyzing data to determine the retention period
- establishing a process for data removal
An optimal data retention policy can help you save overage fees for exceeding storage limits or more retention periods. A good practice is to store only relevant and valuable data for optimized performance and costs.
3. Schedule Data Backups
You can use the Data Export Service for weekly or monthly exports, selecting data objects for inclusion in the backup. A premium Salesforce Backup and Restore helps you schedule automated daily backups. Third-party tools enable you to take more frequent, granular backups and align the backup schedule with business needs.
The backup frequency should be based on how often your data changes and the criticality of the information. For highly transactional environments such as e-commerce, more frequent backups (e.g., daily or even hourly) are recommended compared to less dynamic environments.
While scheduling your data backups, you should also consider the amount of data loss your organization can tolerate (also known as the recovery point objective).
4. High-frequency Automated Backups
Manual Salesforce backups are effort-intensive and time-consuming and can lead to poor quality or loss of data. Consider automating Salesforce backups with solutions like Flosum for high-frequency backups that do not require manual intervention. This can help you save time and protect your data against mishaps.
5. Select an Appropriate Backup Solution
You can store and retrieve backup data using native Salesforce backup solutions or dedicated third-party backup tools. The native backup tools allow you to create backups manually or schedule them periodically at a predetermined frequency.
The premium comprehensive paid add-on native backup solution lets organizations easily set up and configure their backup policy. Data backups take place automatically once every 24 hours starting at 5:00 PM Central. However, you can configure your policy to capture monthly, weekly, daily, or hourly backups and choose a start time and preferred time zone.
Your customized backup schedule supersedes Salesforce's standard schedule, which stops making automatic daily backups at the default start time. However, it's important to note that while there is flexibility, the customization options by native salesforce backup solutions may be limited compared to third-party tools.
These solutions offer organizations more flexibility, granularity, and automation than Salesforce's native backup options. The solutions' advanced features, like metadata backups, versioning, and point-in-time recovery, enable seamless restoration of both data and configurations.
You should carefully evaluate multiple native Salesforce and third-party data backup solutions, considering your organization's business and technical requirements.
As a best practice, you must complement Salesforce native data backup solutions with third-party data backup and recovery tools to ensure critical business data is secure and recoverable.
6. Secure Your Data Backups
Ensure that all data is processed and stored in an encrypted format to avoid unauthorized access during the backup process. The native Salesforce encryption features are reliable. Therefore, you should consider data security while considering third-party backup tools.
7. Monitor & Regulate Access
Regularly review permissions to your Salesforce backup to regulate data access and ensure only authorized personnel can view or edit backup files. You must ensure that no ordinary user has permission to modify metadata, customize the application, modify all data, or view and set up configuration.
8. Monitor Backup Activities
Automated backups may fail for many reasons, such as connectivity issues, storage limits, or software glitches. Monitoring tools can track backup activities and receive alerts for anomalies or failures. This enables you to identify and address issues before they escalate into significant failure.
9. Integrate with a Disaster Recovery Plan
Salesforce backup should be part of your disaster recovery (DR) technology solution and tailored to your specific operational requirements and security objectives. This will complement the native Salesforce disaster recovery solutions that cover various scenarios, from hardware failures to large-scale regional or international disasters.
The integration with the DR plan ensures streamlined communications to employees, customers, and other stakeholders during data loss incidents. It ensures everyone is aware of their roles in restoring operations quickly.
10. Test Backup & Restore Procedures Regularly
You should periodically test your backup process by simulating recovery scenarios to ensure data can be restored when needed. This will also train your team to act promptly in cases of data loss and minimize the downtime during the recovery. Additionally, you must utilize audit trails to monitor user activities within Salesforce and review audit logs to track data access, changes, and deletions.
11. Align Backup with Compliance Requirements
Regulated pharmaceutical and financial services industries have strict data retention and protection regulations. Your Salesforce backup strategy must factor in data regulations and industry-specific compliance requirements.
A comprehensive backup strategy helps ensure compliance with laws such as GDPR or HIPAA. For example, a pharmaceutical company adheres to 21 CFR Part 11 by implementing timestamped backups and validation processes to ensure data authenticity.
12. Establish a Data Governance Policy
Define and regularly update data ownership, access controls, lifecycle management, and retention policies. This will help you ensure data reliability, mitigate risks, and adapt to regulatory changes.
Conclusion
Your Salesforce data is constantly at risk, and implementing a comprehensive Salesforce backup strategy is essential to protect it and ensure business continuity. You can implement the best practices above to protect your valuable data against breaches and other security incidents.
The native Salesforce backup solutions have technical limitations and cost implications. To minimize risks and ensure business continuity, you can combine native tools, third-party solutions like Flosum, and strategic processes. Schedule a call to learn more.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Does Salesforce have Backups?
Salesforce provides multiple essential native built-in tools for data backup and recovery. These include Data Export Service for manual or scheduled exports, Data Loader for bulk data import or export via API, and Full Sandbox replicating the production environment primarily used for development and testing, which can serve as an additional backup solution.
The premium Salesforce Backup is a comprehensive paid add-on backup solution that provides automated backups, including metadata and allows for more straightforward data restoration.
How to Set Up Salesforce Backup?
Salesforce data backups generate your organization's CRM files in comma-separated values (CSV) format. The data to be included in the backup is determined by the organization's data retention policy.
You can use the native Data Export Service to back up your Salesforce data manually or on a schedule. Alternatively, you can subscribe to Salesforce's Backup and Restore service for automated daily backups and easy restores.
In many cases, using third-party solutions like Flosum is a better option. It offers custom-designed backup services for comprehensive data backup. Flosum automates backups, ensures metadata inclusion, and enables granular recovery.
Where are Salesforce Backups Stored?
Salesforce backups are primarily stored in Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud storage, specifically on S3. You can choose the AWS region to store your backups.
Conclusion
Your Salesforce data is constantly at risk, and implementing a comprehensive Salesforce backup strategy is essential to protect it and ensure business continuity. You can implement the best practices above to protect your valuable data against breaches and other security incidents.
The native Salesforce backup solutions have technical limitations and cost implications. To minimize risks and ensure business continuity, you can combine native tools, third-party solutions like Flosum, and strategic processes. Schedule a call to learn more.
