At the last Dreamforce 2021 conference, Salesforce announced their latest plan to introduce the new backup and restore feature. There was an old data backup and restore service, which they had withdrawn in July 2020. Since this news broke about the new backup and restore option, there have been many discussions going around the same. In this article, we will discuss some random thoughts about the effectiveness of this new feature in the Salesforce ecosystem and also the usage of some other solutions for the same purpose.
Salesforce is now asking the customers to cede complete control over the data with their own-platform solutions. This is like storing your spare car keys in the glove compartment just in case you are locked out. It does not make any sense. The customers choose to deal with third=-party services as they trust such providers. When it comes to data protection and recovery, Salesforce also promotes these solutions to the customers. The solutions offered by these partner services have been put into practice with many data incidents, which range from small data loss to catastrophic incidents.
Owing to the trust of the Salesforce users, these advanced tools have doubled their revenue over the last couple of years. This is one reason why Salesforce also invested in such platforms for data and backup solutions. Also, data backup and recovery are just one of the aspects of their holistic strategy for data protection. The dramatic increase in data volume, variety, and velocity makes it more challenging to protect. This is the reason why these leading data backup and recovery solutions have five-star reviews at the App Exchange.
This is one major reason why App Exchange data backup and restoration apps allow customers to manage access to more sensitive data and also prevent any data loss. With the expanding offerings of such services, the admins can effectively collaborate DevOps and InfoSec to ensure backup, archive, and seeded in the sandboxes.
Going forward, these third-party tools are expected to build a stronger backup for Salesforce, which will help to elevate the proactivity and criticality of data for protection. With this being said, Salesforce customers also make it clear about what they may expect from a standard data protection solution and remain as a trusted partner for companies across the globe.
High-frequency data backup services
High-frequency data backup is an add-on service offered by data backup tools aimed at resolving specific issues related to data backup use cases. This is meant to back up the frequently changing transactional data at very close intervals, like every hour or so.
Leading backup services also feature high-frequency data backup, which will help protect more specific objects like customer support data, financial and transactional data, e-com data, banking, trading data, etc. These data backups are often created multiple times every day. Let us further explore the usage of a high-frequency salesforce data backup service.
Setting up the high-frequency backup
The High-Frequency Backup (HFB) service can be custom set by the Salesforce users. Further, we will explore how this can be done. For this, you need to first make sure that this feature is made available in your user plan.
- First, go to Account Settings.
- Choose the tab of Overview.
- Review Plan Features section.
- Add new service and choose Data or the Sandbox Data service,
- Check the field of Selected Objects.
- You can enter up to five objects separated by spaces. This can be done exactly as per the Salesforce API name. It is case-sensitive.
- Choose the Business Unit for allocating the service.
HFB best practices
You need to consider the high-frequency backups for the highly transactional objects to provide a restoration point if there is data corruption. Next, map out the data schema and also check for related objects which may require a restore. Say, for example, if you are trying to backup an Account object, then first check if the Contact or Cases are included to preserve the relationship. Unlike any regular services backups to be followed, if an object with related objects is not included within five object limits, this approach to backup may omit the related objects and may not be used for restoration.
By providing advanced services at premium packages, these third-party services also offer special backup and recovery tools, which are specifically designed with the unique requirements of Salesforce users in case of data corruption or loss. These data backup providers offer customized backup and protection packages for various industries using Salesforce for various types of businesses. They can offer backup for both data and metadata where data can be in any form like documents, articles, chatter feeds, personal files, orphaned records, attachments, etc., can be backed up with it.
These backup services not only back up data but will also help to speed up the backup process. The large enterprise customers use such advanced services, which are committed to helping them do the backup in just a matter of hours or days compared to the six to eight weeks of the backup time the Salesforce native backup service takes. Even though such advanced tools are designed to work well for large enterprises with many customers and different sandboxes, they can work well with small organizations too.
For organizations working on Salesforce, third-party backup and recovery services can offer expert and unrelenting data backup and restoration services. These also feature a very comfortable and user-friendly interface that makes it more comfortable for the admins and users to operate it easily.
As there are many backup services and tools available at the app store, you need to be very careful about choosing the apt one for your purpose. Compare the features of various apps in light of the unique needs you have. Along with the backup options and capacities, always check what they got to offer in terms of quick and hassle-free recovery in case of a data disaster. Check out whether they offer cloud-based backup services and the support response time if a query or data-related concern is raised. Also, test such services for a trial period before fully adopting their solutions.