EXPLAINED: Top 5 Best Practices for Data Backup & Recovery in Salesforce

In this increasingly digitized business landscape, data is no doubt extremely valuable to businesses that use the Salesforce cloud platform. And since data is the lifeblood of such modern Salesforce organizations, losing it can cause massive damage & disrupt critical business operations. This is why data loss in Salesforce must be prevented at all costs. There are several ways in which data can be lost from the Salesforce system such as cybercrime, human error, bad coding, malicious intent, or simply data theft.

Many small businesses are under the misconception that only big companies fall prey to hackers. In fact, a data breach investigation conducted by Verizon found that about 72% of large enterprises & 28% of small companies fell victim to cybercrime. The same is the case with human errors as employees can sometimes accidentally delete important data records or overwrite them. This is why having an end-to-end data protection strategy is a must for Salesforce enterprises; of which data backup is a major aspect.

Data Backup in Salesforce: Briefly Explained

In very simple terms, data backup is the practice of copying data from the primary data storage in Salesforce to a secure secondary location, to protect it in case of a disaster, accident, or malicious action. It essentially combines techniques & solutions for efficient & cost-effective long-term retention of data. By copying the data to one or more locations, at pre-determined frequencies, & at different capacities, data backup becomes critical for all businesses.

To run a complete data backup process in their Salesforce systems, users must identify what the organizational data must be backed up, then schedule those backups & set up the backup parameters. This is followed by identifying the storage media for storing those backups. After performing these functions, they must choose upon the data backup solution they will leverage, authenticate the performance of the systems, & finally report on the backup & recovery activities.

Data Backup Best Practices

Determining the Critical Business Requirements

First & foremost, backup administrators must be aware of the business requirements of their Salesforce enterprise. This includes knowing which departments need to have their data backed up, how much data will be backed up, & how critical that data is to the organization. The criticality of the data is determined by its importance to the company; the loss of which will affect the organization immensely. Critical data may consist of revenue records, emerging trends, market plans, databases, documents, etc. Though it may be tempting to back up the entire data, admins must refrain from that as it affects the overall performance of the backup system adversely.

Defining your Data Backup & Recovery Policy

The next best practice is to design a comprehensive policy that sets forth the primary activities & parameters governing the backup & recovery processes in Salesforce. This includes choosing a backup location that best suits your organization’s needs followed by establishing a proper filing system for the backed up data. Next comes setting up proper recovery point objective (RPO) & recovery time objective (RTO) metrics, & finally documenting the entire data backup & recovery processes. Deciding the backup frequency, backup type, & backup automation are also a part of the backup policy.

Selecting the Ideal Data Backup Solution

After carefully devising a data backup policy for your Salesforce enterprise, the next (& perhaps the most important) best practice is choosing the right kind of data backup solution as it plays a major role in the data backup strategy. The chosen solution must have the ability to backup, restore, recover, & maintain the availability of backed-up Salesforce data at all times. An appropriate backup solution is essential for having efficient & effective backups and can also prevent data loss to a major extent.

Review & Test your Data Backup Strategy

It is also beneficial to actually test the data backup & recovery strategy, you implemented in your Salesforce system, from time to time to ensure that it’s not only working but that the backed-up data is actually recoverable. This also includes authenticating the integrity of the backed-up data & checking for any data anomalies. Admins are advised to perform a mock recovery test at least once or twice a year, depending on the size of their organization.

Report the Data Backup Activities

Lastly, as a final data backup best practice, the backup administrators must periodically prepare analysis reports about the proper functioning of the data backup strategy for the enterprise’s senior management. This report must outline all the data backup & recovery activities being performed in the Salesforce system. The report must also include the overall summary-level findings about the deviations from performance metrics & updates performed.

We hope these data backup best practices will aid you in devising a comprehensive data backup & recovery strategy in your Salesforce enterprise. A secure data backup strategy is the base of a robust data protection policy in Salesforce that protects data from corruption, accidental deletion, viruses, & malware. To make this backup strategy easier for your enterprise we offer you our data backup solution, DataArchiva Backup.

DataArchiva Backup is a robust data backup & recovery solution that is specially designed for securely backing up the business-critical data from Salesforce into the AWS S3 cloud server. Possessing reliable backup & quick recovery capabilities, the app lets users take either full or incremental backups of their data to help them overcome their fear of losing data. To understand the application better, feel free to 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.