We believe that people do things for the best of intentions and let’s be honest mistakes do happen from time to time. This could be in the form of a user carrying out a mass update or changing a simple Salesforce© picklist value which has a knock on effect throughout the system. To get data or the original configuration to its prior state could be a potential nightmare if you haven’t got the right processes in place.
Here at Performa IT we strongly recommend having a backup strategy in place, this drastically reduces risk and also wins you brownie points with your Quality & IT managers, what could be better than that!
There are two forms of backup for a Salesforce system, namely:
Metadata is the nuts and bolts of Salesforce e.g. Apex code, page layouts, assignment rules, approval processes.
Data, this is the records that are held in Salesforce e.g. Accounts, Contacts, Leads and the very important Opportunities.
There are a number of options to carry out backups, for example;
Salesforce Data Export
Extracting data via Dataloader I/O
Downloading reports from Salesforce
Or an Appexchange product
All of which have their advantages and disadvantages.
Here are some questions below to give you a flavour of what you need to consider!
- What is the cost in time and money to your organisation if you had to reinstall that data?
- Is taking a weekly or monthly backup sufficient?
- What is your retention period for keeping data?
- How would you comply with a right to be forgotten request?
- How would you know if a downloaded report or extract has become corrupted?
As a Registered Salesforce Partner we have a number of options to suit your organisation and budget. If you would like to find out more please contact us today, our team will be happy to assist you.
Please take note, not having an adequate backup process in place could prove to be incredibly costly, it is your responsibility.
