Salesforce stopped its premium data recovery service in 2020 and then brought it back in 2021. However, this service is too slow as it may take about six to eight weeks to retrieve the data, and the users need to manually export the CSV data files for restoration. It is also costly as for every instance; you need to pay $10000 for data recovery by Salesforce. Salesforce recommends using third-party tools available at the AppExchange Salesforce app store for data backup and recovery. Here in this article, we will discuss some of the top third-party data backup and recovery tools you can use more cost-effectively to save time and effort in case of a data loss.
Before discussing the tools, we will first have an overview of the Salesforce data loss and recovery scenario.
Data vs. metadata on Salesforce
While understanding data backup and restoration, you must first understand the difference between data and metadata.
– Salesforce Data: Data refers to Salesforce records stored in the custom and standard objects. An ID represents all these data records on Salesforce. Data is very much like a spreadsheet that contains a value in the form of rows and columns. Salesforce data is stored in objects like Accounts, Leads, Cases, Files, Chatter, etc.
– Salesforce Metadata – This is the information about customization or configuration changes you do to meet the business requirement for Salesforce data. For example, it includes changing the apex trigger, custom fields, apex classes, and various assignment rules.
Data backup and recovery on Salesforce
For those who were never in need of recovering data yet, it is essential to know that there may be many situations where the users may accidentally delete data in more enormous volumes due to ignorance. For example, in the production instances where they may use Data Loader to export data in a manual or automated way, it is very much possible that a single mistake may end up in replacing millions of data or corrupting the same.
Ample downtime is the major drawback of the salesforce data recovery and backup service. As we discussed earlier, the Data Backup Recovery service by Salesforce is not free, and it can take about six to eight weeks for you to get the data recovered. To do salesforce data recovery and backup in such cases, you have to raise a data recovery ticket with Salesforce, who will provide you some estimates as to when they can get back to you with the restored data.
Using third-party data backup and recovery tools
As discussed, it is not user-friendly and effective to use the native Salesforce data backup and recovery as it is mainly time-consuming and high priced. Moreover, you are getting the backup data in the form of CSV files, which you have to export to Salesforce to retrieve the data manually. All these require a lot of person-hours in addition to the already six to eight weeks delay in restoration. All these will be a downtime for critical business operations that they may not be to afford. Here is the relevance of backup and restoration tools available at the Salesforce App Exchange marketplace. Salesforce also recommends using these tools for reliable data and metadata backup and recovery service. Let us review five such tools here.
Ownbackup
OwnBackup has been a well-known company in the data backup and recovery industry for a long time. The tool helps you to backup Salesforce data and metadata in real-time. It supports many other cloud-based CRMs other than Salesforce too. Some of the other cloud CRMs supported by Ownbackup include but are not limited to nCino (which is a banking application integrated into Salesforce platform) and Veeva (a solution that supports the life science research projects which also adopts Salesforce as a platform) etc.
Spanning
Spanning is another powerful cloud-based data backup and recovery solution for Salesforce users. Also, Office 365 and G-suite are offered support by Spanning, a Kaseya company. The company also acts as a leading competitor to many other companies in this sector. The significant advantage of Spanning is that it offers a click-based user-friendly solution for Salesforce data backup within a matter of seconds. The provider claims that they have supported more than 10000 organizations, and the clientele is steadily growing.
Grax
Like the above-discussed ones, Grax is also a high data value backup platform that offers manual or scheduled backup for Salesforce data anytime. If the users want to recover the Salesforce data back in time, it is easy to use Grax time machine functionality and bring back the data to any point you have enjoyed in the past. This ensures optimum security for your enterprise data.
Odaseva
Odaseva is an enterprise solution for ease of backing up the Salesforce and cloud CRM data backup and restoration. Odaseva uses its innovative data governance platform to automate the backup and is now being used by many leading product-based companies like “Schneider Electric.”
CloudAlly
CloudAlly, as the name suggests, is a cloud-based data backup and data recovery tool for Salesforce. It is a well-known application for the business, which offers a very cost-effective and time-critical data recovery support—CloudAlly backups the entire Salesforce data to Amazon S3 Storage with a high level of recoverability.
Data is the most valuable asset for any organization. So you need to consider the features and benefits of each of these tools and then identify the best possible solutions. So, these are the top 5 solutions you may try out for your enterprise data backup and recovery for Salesforce. You may compare the options and adopt a non-native Salesforce data backup and recovery tool from the App exchange to ensure that you kept Salesforce native recovery only as of the last resource.
