Data Recovery Digest

Salesforce is used worldwide by all sorts of businesses to manage their customer relationship data. Founded in 2001, Salesforce is now one of the biggest companies in the world.

For any company, the thought of losing their Salesforce data is inconceivable – all of that customer information is incredibly valuable. That’s why it’s so important to have a backup plan in place. But what happens if you haven’t and you lose your Salesforce data?

Well, for a long time you could rely on the Salesforce Data Recovery Services. This was a service offered by Salesforce directly, where their support team could recover your data to a specific point in time. However, this has now been retired as of July 2020.

This service was a manual one that cost a flat rate of $10,000. According to Salesforce, the manual work involved costs a lot more than that, but they pay for a portion of the service. To many, that’s an extravagant figure, but to the businesses that are looking at lost data it might seem like a bargain.

The data recovery service was only provided as a last resort, after all other options had been exhausted. These include restoring from the recycle bin, reinserting the data from a CSV backup, or querying the API for IsDeleted records.

Even this service had its limitations, though. Data could only be recovered from three months prior to the current date and you had to manually import the recovered CSV data yourself.

Now, though, this service is retired. So where does that leave businesses against the threat of lost data? That data could get deleted by accident, by a flaw within the system, or by a malicious hacker or internal user. It needs to be protected.

There are various protection options still available. For one, the data can be manually exported. This can also be scheduled so that no user intervention is required. The data could also be manually exported by reports, though automation really is the way to go. That said, while these methods do indeed export your data, it’s not really a sound disaster recovery plan because it doesn’t take into account the actual recovery part.

That’s why most companies who use Salesforce will use a third-party client application to manage the backup and recovery. In fact, that’s what Salesforce themselves recommend businesses to do. These partner backup solutions benefit Salesforce; at the end of the day, Salesforce are not responsible for your data, they just provide the platform on which it can be stored.

“Best practice for customers now is to leverage the eco-system and contract with a vendor for a backup and recovery solution,” says Christophe Bertrand, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). “ESG research points to the fact that SLAs for data protection of Salesforce environments are very stringent, much like on-premises, but it is questionable how many organisations could actually deliver on those if they have not implemented robust backup and recovery processes and solutions.”

If your company uses Salesforce, take the time to review your backup and recovery plans. You’ll be thankful you did.