Salesforce Announces NEW ‘Backup & Restore’ Product at Dreamforce’21

For quite a while Salesforce has depended on third party providers to fill in the need for their customers’ data to be backed up or archived.

Salesforce offered very basic recovery services and no data backup services to its customers which meant that the customers would have to spend extra on getting backup products such as Odaseva, OwnBackup, CloudAlly etc to perform these tasks.

This year, during Dreamforce, Salesforce announced a native solution that would meet the need to data to be backed up and restored seamlessly.

What is the Native Salesforce Backup & Restore?

Salesforce’s new native ‘backup and restore’ solution protects customers data in case of accidental data loss or corruption by keeping a backup of that data on Salesforce servers. This backup is separate to the original data stored on the Salesforce Instance.

This backup can be restored back into the objects by a few simple clicks from a user friendly UI available to the administrators of the Org.

Main Features

Lets look at what this product has to offer its customers.

1. Seamless Integration: Ability to access backup and restore features from the UI.
2. Access Permissions: Grant access to create, manage and restore backups to different users.
3. Customizable Backup Frequency: Define frequency of backups as either ad-hoc or recurring.
4. Customizable Data Restoration: Ability to define field-based and time-based criteria to filter out data to be backed up.
5. Automatic Purging: Purge or permanently remove data from backup to free up space after a given time period, if needed.
6. Restore Partial Data: Ability to choose what data to restore instead of entire data set.
7. Compare Multiple Backups: Ability to compare different backups to restore the correct one.
8. Reporting: Ability to report on backed up data.
9. Dashboards: Ability to visualize and track backup status.

Why is it important to Backup Data?

Salesforce is a reliable and expandable platform. However, there are still multiple reasons why it is very important to back up data. We have listed a few main reasons and scenarios why it essential to back up data.

• Recover Data lost accidently
• Access data that is unavailable on main Org due to system outage or incident.
• Overwriting Data back to original value after data updates go wrong.
• Being compliant with industry standards to have a back up of data.
• Fast Data Recovery
• Trusting the system and its data

How it works?

Salesforce native ‘backup and restore’ seamlessly integrates with the Salesforce Org from where data is backed up, because of this, it is easy to plan a backup of data and restore data, if needed.

It is installed on the main Salesforce Org via a managed package, once the feature is added to the contract between Salesforce and the customer.

What is the cost?

Salesforce offers a minimum of 400GB for backing up data from the main Salesforce Org. The price may vary depending on individual agreement and contract between Salesforce and the Customer. However, Salesforce has quoted $14 USD per GB per month to its customers.

Conclusion

The availability of this feature is announced to be by end of 2021 i.e. soon! There is also a roadmap to allow multiple Orgs used by one customers to use the same backup and restore application.