Guide to Salesforce Data Archiving: How to, Strategies, and Best Practices

Cut costs and boost performance with Salesforce data archiving by keeping what you need without the clutter.

Salesforce data is essential, containing crucial information that supports customer-facing teams such as sales, marketing, and customer service in nurturing customer relationships and following up on leads. Businesses strive to keep their Salesforce data optimized, readily accessible, and secure to support smooth operations across departments. That’s where the Salesforce data archiving concept comes in.

Archiving Salesforce data is crucial for managing data growth and optimizing storage usage. Organizations can improve performance, reduce costs, enhance security, and ensure compliance by systematically transferring historical data to an archive storage system. This approach helps maintain an efficient Salesforce environment while ensuring that data is preserved and accessible when needed.

Key steps in the data archiving process include identifying data for archiving, selecting an appropriate archiving solution, planning the archiving process, executing the data transfer, validating the archive, and maintaining the archive. By effectively implementing all these steps, businesses can unlock the full potential of Salesforce while minimizing the risks associated with data overload.

A Brief Introduction to Salesforce Data Archiving

Salesforce Data Archiving is a strategic process that helps you manage the ever-growing Salesforce data. By automatically moving older, less-used data to a secure, separate archive, you free up valuable storage space, optimize the Salesforce org’s performance, enhance search capabilities, and ensure an efficient and agile Salesforce environment.

This is also crucial for reducing storage costs and ensuring regulatory compliance. Native Salesforce archiving solutions can help automate the process, providing an integrated way to manage data retention without relying on third-party tools.

These built-in features offer a seamless approach to archiving data, ensuring that records are preserved according to compliance requirements while optimizing your Salesforce org’s efficiency.

Why Archive Salesforce Data?

As your Salesforce org grows, so does its data volume. This growth can lead to performance bottlenecks, increased storage costs, and challenges in maintaining data quality. To mitigate these issues, Salesforce archiving solutions emerge as a strategic solution.

By implementing Salesforce archiving solutions, organizations can efficiently manage and store data for

Improved Org Performance
Reduced Storage Costs
Supports Compliance
Simplifies Data Retrieval

This archived data can be securely stored on-premise or in an external storage solution, ensuring easy accessibility for future reference while keeping your primary Salesforce instance optimized and efficient.

Data Archiving Options: On-Premise Data Archiving vs External Archiving

Once the decision to archive Salesforce data is made, the next crucial step is to determine the most suitable storage location. Primarily, there are two options: on-premise data archiving and external archiving. Each approach presents unique advantages and considerations, and the optimal choice depends on various factors such as data volume, security requirements, and budgetary constraints. Let’s explore these two options in more detail.

On-Premise Data Archiving

On-premise data archiving involves storing archived Salesforce data within your organization’s own data center. This approach offers a high degree of control over data security and accessibility. Benefits of On-Premise Data Archiving:

Enhanced Security: By storing data on-premises, you have greater control over security measures, including physical access controls and encryption.
Reduced Latency: Direct access to data stored locally can lead to faster retrieval times, especially for large datasets.
Cost-Effective for Smaller Data Volumes: On-premise archiving can be a cost-effective solution for organizations with relatively small data volumes.

However, on-premise data archiving also presents several challenges:

Increased Infrastructure Costs: Maintaining and managing on-premise storage infrastructure, including hardware, software, and IT personnel, can be costly.
Scalability Limitations: As data volumes grow, on-premise storage may require additional hardware and software investments to accommodate the increased load.

Security Risks: On-premise storage is susceptible to physical security threats, such as theft, fire, and natural disasters.

External Data Archiving

External data archiving involves storing archived Salesforce data in a third-party cloud storage solution or a dedicated data archive service. This approach offers various advantages, including scalability, cost-effectiveness, and enhanced security. Benefits of External Data Archiving:

Scalability: Cloud-based storage solutions can effortlessly adapt to increasing data volumes without requiring substantial upfront investments.
Cost-Effectiveness: Cloud providers frequently offer flexible pay-as-you-go pricing models, making external archiving a budget-friendly option, particularly for organizations with varying data storage needs.
Enhanced Security: Cloud providers invest significantly in robust security measures, such as encryption, access controls, and disaster recovery, to safeguard your data.
Disaster Recovery: External archiving can serve as a valuable disaster recovery solution, ensuring data protection in the event of hardware failures, natural disasters, or security breaches.

Challenges of External Data Archiving:

Data Transfer Costs: Transferring large volumes of data to an external storage solution can incur substantial data transfer costs.
Vendor Lock-in: Relying on a third-party provider can create vendor lock-in, making it difficult to switch to a different solution in the future.
Network Dependency: External archiving relies on a reliable network connection to access and retrieve archived data.
Potential Latency: Accessing data stored in a remote location may introduce latency, especially for large datasets.

DataArchiva is a powerful tool for efficient external data archiving. By integrating with various platforms, like AWS, Azure, Heroku, and Sharepoint, it offers optimized storage costs, enhanced performance, and improved compliance. Its robust security measures and user-friendly interface make it an ideal solution for businesses seeking to manage and protect their Salesforce data effectively.

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Concepts to Archive Salesforce Data

Archiving helps businesses retain valuable information without burdening active storage, ensuring that only essential, up-to-date data remains in the main Salesforce environment. Below, we’ll explore key concepts that support an effective Salesforce data archiving strategy.

Data Identification and Selection: Identify and select data for archiving based on usage patterns, retention policies, and regulatory requirements.
Data Extraction and Transformation: Extract and transform data into a suitable format like .csv for archiving, ensuring data privacy and security.
Data Storage and Retention: Store archived data securely by using encryption or access control and establish a clear data retention policy.
Data Access and Retrieval: Implement efficient data access and retrieval methods to ensure easy access to archived information.

Data Security and Compliance: Prioritize data security and compliance with relevant regulations to protect sensitive information.

Salesforce Data Archiving Strategies

Salesforce data archiving strategies do more than store historical data—they help tackle challenges from growing data volumes while enhancing current processes. Archiving also strengthens compliance by automating data retention, ensuring regulatory standards are met without manual oversight. It optimizes backup and recovery by reducing the volume of active data, making disaster recovery more efficient.

These strategies effectively address rising storage costs by shifting less-used data to cost-efficient storage and eliminating performance bottlenecks by reducing system load. A thoughtful archiving strategy allows businesses to balance data accessibility, performance, and regulatory requirements sustainably.

Here are four key effective Salesforce data archival strategies:

Leverage Salesforce Archive

Salesforce Archive offers automated archiving capabilities that allow you to create custom policies to automatically register inactive records, files, and attachments. You can customize archiving processes to align with your business needs and data retention requirements.

This approach helps ensure compliance and improves system performance by reducing storage costs. By keeping only the most relevant data, you can optimize the efficiency of your Salesforce org while maintaining a clean and streamlined data environment.

Data Extraction and External Storage

Data extraction from Salesforce can be optimized through simple methods, such as directly exporting important data as .csv files. For more automated solutions, ETL tools can be integrated to facilitate the extraction and transfer of data to external systems.

This approach helps reduce the load on Salesforce by offloading historical data to external storage to improve system performance and retain only the relevant data within Salesforce objects.

Third-Party Archiving Solutions

Third-party archiving solutions provide enterprise-level data archiving and management capabilities, offering a more comprehensive approach than built-in tools. These solutions come equipped with advanced features such as automated archiving, customizable data retention policies, and secure data storage to manage and protect data efficiently.

Additionally, third-party archiving solutions like DataArchiva are designed with scalability in mind, allowing them to grow alongside your expanding data needs for long-term reliability and adaptability.

Regular Data Cleanup and Purging

Regular data cleanup and purging are essential practices for maintaining an organized and efficient system. By regularly reviewing and identifying inactive records, you can pinpoint data that is no longer needed.

Purging unnecessary data permanently frees up valuable storage space, improving system performance. It’s also crucial to ensure that data purging practices adhere to relevant data retention and privacy regulations, ensuring compliance while effectively managing data throughout its lifecycle.

Best Practices to Follow for Salesforce Archiving

Want to declutter your Salesforce org without losing precious data? Here are some Salesforce data archiving best practices to help you archive like a pro.

Defining a retention policy is essential for effective data archiving. Begin by assessing your specific needs and determining how long each type of data should be retained. Next, establish clear guidelines that outline your retention policy, ensuring it serves as a structured framework to guide all archiving efforts.

Selecting the right archiving method is essential. Salesforce’s native archiving offers seamless, built-in options, while third-party solutions provide advanced features and customization for specialized needs.

Creating a comprehensive archiving plan involves several key steps. Start by identifying the data you want to archive and determining its location through data mapping. Next, plan how to securely migrate the archived data to a storage location that meets your needs. Finally, establish a method for accessing archived data when necessary, ensuring that retrieval is efficient and secure.

Thorough testing is vital. Start with a pilot archiving to identify potential issues, then validate the integrity of archived data to ensure it remains accurate and complete.

Regularly review your archiving strategy to adapt to changing needs and implement strong security measures to protect archived data.

Data Archiving vs Data Backup in Salesforce

Let’s dive into the world of data management in Salesforce, where two powerful techniques, data archiving and data backup, stand guard over your precious information.

Feature

Data Archiving

Data Backup

Purpose

Moves older, inactive data to long-term storage

Creates copies of data for disaster recovery and protection

Primary Benefit

Improves performance, reduces costs, and enhances security

Protects data from loss, corruption, and accidental deletion

Data Retention

Long-term storage of inactive data

Short-term to long-term storage of active data

Impact on Salesforce Performance

Reduces database size, improving performance

Minimal impact on Salesforce performance

Key Use Cases

Compliance, cost reduction, and performance optimization

Disaster recovery, data protection, and system restoration

The Dynamic Duo: A Powerful Combination

While data archiving and data backup are distinct techniques, they often work hand-in-hand to provide comprehensive data protection. By archiving older data and backing up your active data, you can ensure the safety and accessibility of your valuable information.

DataArchiva - Salesforce Archiving Solution for Superior Data Experience

Implementing effective data management in Salesforce is essential to maintain system efficiency, control costs, and ensure compliance as data volumes grow. DataArchiva, a top Salesforce archiving solution, is designed to meet these demands seamlessly. By adopting DataArchiva’s strategies and best practices, organizations can achieve optimal data management and enjoy key benefits:

Better Control: Organizes archived data for easy access, keeping active Salesforce data relevant.
Compliance: Automates retention policies to meet regulatory standards with ease.
Data Ownership: Provides secure, on-platform storage, ensuring data remains accessible and under complete control.
Cost Efficiency: Reduces storage expenses by archiving low-use data.
Enhanced Performance: Minimizes data clutter, boosting system speed and efficiency.
Data Security: Protects archived data with secure access, safeguarding privacy and compliance.

Embrace the power of DataArchiva and safeguard your digital future. Book a Demo now!

FAQs

Can you archive data in Salesforce?

Yes, you can archive data in Salesforce using its native archiving tool or third-party solutions like DataArchiva

What is the difference between archive and delete in Salesforce?

Archiving moves data to a secure storage location for future access, while deleting permanently removes it from the system.

What is data cleansing?

Data cleansing is the process of cleaning up messy data by correcting errors, filling in missing information, and removing unnecessary or inaccurate data.

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DataArchiva offers three powerful applications through AppExchange including Native Data Archiving powered by BigObjects, External Data Archiving using 3rd-party Cloud/On-prem Platforms, and Data & Metadata Backup & Recovery for Salesforce.

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