Why Does Salesforce Recommend Third-Party Data backup and Recovery Apps?

Even though we assume the data to be safe on the cloud at Salesforce CRM, the background rule is always responsible for your data. It means backing up your data and having a perfect plan for restoration is essential if you are a Salesforce user, especially when your entire business process relies on Son Salesforce data. You cannot rely on the Salesforce backup service, which is only a last resource. On the other hand, you need to worry about data loss and the need for restoration at if you use a backup app. The customers may be risking their valuable data if they don’t have the same as Salesforce now does not offer any complete dataset backup services daily.

As of late, the built-in data backup and protection features of Salesforce only include:

1. Weekly export – This feature will only back up the data set weekly, but in case of a failure in between, you may lose the entire week of data. This is crucial in business sales processes where tons of data are created every day.

2. Exporting to the data warehouse – This is not as easy as you may think. It required a custom script and also essential API knowledge to accomplish this.

3. Sandbox refresh – This has a standard 30-day refresh period, which means you will not retrieve the Sandbox data after that time frame.

4. Salesforce Data recovery service – As we discussed above, this can only be the last resource if you do not have any other data recovery mode. However, it may take about 6 to 8 weeks to complete and also cost about $10,000. It is not also a one-click solution to get your data restored. You get the data back in CSV format, which you need to export further manually. Once you have this data, you will then be able to make use of something like this csv import tool, if you then need to import any data back to your website so that it is as user-friendly as possible for your customers.

Considering these factors, we can see that none of these methods are foolproof to meet enterprise data backup needs. The IT departments in enterprises may consider it as a baseline data backup service. In modern-day enterprises, the acceptable data loss timeframe is measured in a matter of minutes or seconds as a huge chunk of data is being created every minute. So, the scope of losing even a day’s worth of data is unthinkable to them, and this is where instant salesforce data backup and recovery is important. Restoration also should be considered as fast as possible, probably in a matter of minutes.

Data custodian

The SaaS apps like Salesforce CRM do not consider themselves the data custodians of the user data in multi-tenant environments. It is, in fact, the customers who are considered to be the data custodians. Similar to how you handle data as you run your internal applications and data center, you also have to take care of your Salesforce data as the primary custodian. Enterprises can roll their backup apps, and for doing this job, you need to have a routine script to use the Salesforce API call and write your application codes. However, this option may not be feasible for most of the users to leverage.

This is the major reason why different add-on SaaS applications like OwnBackup etc., offer a complete backup, restore, and data archival solution for Salesforce users. There are other third-party backup solutions also like Druva, CopyStorm, Reflection Enterprise, Spanning, etc., which you can use.

Let’s explore the top data backup solutions for Salesforce as below.

Reflection Enterprise – This is an advanced next-generation data backup and recovery solution for Salesforce that lets you run on-premises cloud backup, restoration, and replication of Salesforce data across the platform. It also facilitates anytime data recovery, replication to SQL DBs, BI integration, data migration, and Sandbox seeding.

CopyStorm – Another next-gen data backup solution for Salesforce facilitates incremental backup of the data and metadata on your relational DB. With the archival solution, you will be able to see the deleted records indefinitely and restore the same when needed by using CopyStorm/Restore. It also has no storage limit, which makes unlimited data backup and restoration possible for the users. CopyStorm can also read the metadata and scratch through the databases, and query Salesforce. It can also write the records and continue to the next table until all the tables are copies.

Druva – This tool offers end-to-end data protection and backup on Salesforce. With the use of the Druva app, you will be able to set up an automated cloud backup quickly. It can also help prevent any malicious or accidental data loss. You can also try to use data or restore on demand for instant data recovery and also to manage the Salesforce backup and restoration activities directly via Salesforce or you can use inSync’s centralized dashboard.

ForceAmp – It features DBAmp, with which you can build custom reports using real-time data or mirrored data from Salesforce, which can be used to integrate Salesforce.com with local applications. It features a full backup of the Salesforce.com data with a single command and can also keep your data backup in sync with the incremental refresh of DBAmp. It will do the backing up of your data and let you write the bi-directional integrations using local SQL.

OwnBackup – This is one of the quickest and most comprehensive Salesforce apps for data backup. The provider offers to give you a comprehensive backup of all your data and metadata, which include custom objects and different relationships, chatter feeds, standard objects, etc. along with knowledge articles and personal accounts, OwnBackup will also offer some defense against data loss scenario using some automated backups and enterprise-ready data protection. These can be operated as standalone services, which you can use to access your data backups even when you are offline.

Considering all these third-party apps and looking at their features, you can easily assume that these apps are far better than Salesforce’s data backup and restoration services. These third-party apps also come very cheap and are easy to download and installed. It is a great idea to use it for your operations.