Different Types of Data Backups in Salesforce: Choosing What Suits Your Enterprise

Being part of the Salesforce ecosystem, we have had the good fortune of connecting with business leaders across different industries. And the one thing we have learned after talking with most of them is that data loss in cloud platforms, like Salesforce, quietly sneaks up on everyone. A system failure or corruption, no matter how uncommon, has the potential to wipe out all data or render it useless.

As a general thumb rule, the only way to tackle data loss incidents in Salesforce is by having a solid data backup strategy for the system. To be honest, most companies these days are aware of the importance of putting a data backup strategy in place but even then nearly one-third of them face challenges while backing up data. The blame for it can be put upon the way the backup strategy is perceived.

In the spirit of helping enterprises create proper data backup strategies for their Salesforce systems, we’re going to shift the focus away from ‘why data backup’ & shed some light on the different types of data backup available.

Types of Data Backups in Salesforce

When it comes to Salesforce (or any cloud platform for that matter), there are mainly three types of data backups that are prevalent. These backup types differ from each other in several respects: data backup time, data restoration time, data storage costs, backup complexity, overall savings, & much more. Let’s discuss the indifferent types individually:

Full Data Backup

Perhaps the simplest form of data backup & also the easiest to understand is full data backup.  During a full backup, enterprises essentially make a backup of every data they wish to protect every time. In short, all data & metadata are copied over to the secondary storage each time. Probably the most comprehensive of all backup types, the highlight of a full backup is the minimal time it requires to restore data into production.

However, since everything is backed up in one go, it is also the most time-consuming of all backup types. Also, these take up more system resources & tend to overload the data storage. Full backups also often result in many redundant data copies as most data in the dataset hardly changes between backups. This is the reason why most enterprises prefer to perform full data backups only periodically.

Also Read: How to Perfect your Data Backup & Recovery Strategy in Salesforce

Incremental Data Backup

The next type of data backup in Salesforce is incremental data backup. During this type of data backup, the first backup is a full backup but all succeeding backups copy only that data that is changed since the last backup operation of any type. These can be carried out as often as desired since they copy a smaller amount of data than the full backup. Therefore, they have the fastest data backup speed & also require less amount of data storage.

However, they also have the reputation for having the most time-consuming & complex data restoration process out of all backup types. This is because enterprises first need to restore the latest full backup dataset followed by each of the incremental backup sets in proper order. And if even one of these backup datasets is missing or damaged, a full restoration is impossible.

Differential Data Backup

A differential data backup is the last type of data backup in Salesforce. They are similar to incremental backups in the sense that the first backup process is a full backup. But while incremental backups copy data that is changed since the last backup type, the differential data backups copy all data that is modified since the last full backup process. Thus, they store more backed-up data than an incremental backup on subsequent operations, although typically still far less than a full backup.

However, differential backups require more space & time to complete than incremental backups, although still less than full backups. But they do allow for a faster restoration time as it requires only two backup components: an initial full backup & the latest differential backup.

Formulating the Right Kind of Data Backup Strategy

For a majority of Salesforce enterprises, their data backup strategy starts and ends with deciding what data to backup & how to back it up. But in reality, a backup strategy must also cover what and which type of data backup to implement. This is because while the former gives the enterprise its backup strategy, the latter gives them the right data backup strategy that will benefit them.

If you need some help formulating your enterprise data backup strategy for Salesforce, you can always look towards DataArchiva Backup. This robust data backup & recovery solution for Salesforce will help you ensure the safety of your data in Salesforce by creating secure data copies in AWS S3 storage. What’s best is the application’s ability to support both full & incremental backups along with seamless data restoration. To understand the application in detail, check out this product datasheet or please get in touch with us.

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DataArchiva is an enterprise data management application built for Salesforce that offers complete data management solutions including archive, backup, and seeding.