Does Salesforce Back Up My Data? A Comprehensive Guide

As the leader in customer relationship management (CRM) with over 200,000 customers, Salesforce handles vast amounts of sensitive data. But is that data being backed up? This article explores the intricacies of Salesforce backup and restore processes, responsibilities, and best practices to ensure your data remains safe and recoverable. For a deeper dive into all things Salesforce backup and recovery, click here. 

Does Salesforce need to be backed up?

A common misconception is that data stored in cloud applications, like Salesforce, is automatically secure and doesn't require backups. While Salesforce offers robust security measures and internal backups to protect against infrastructure failures, this does not make your data immune to loss. Numerous scenarios can compromise data integrity, including human error, malicious attacks, and integration issues with other systems. 

Who is responsible for backing up Salesforce data?

The responsibility for backing up data in Salesforce is shared. The shared responsibility model states that Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) like Salesforce are responsible for the security of the cloud, and customers are responsible for security in the cloud. So, while Salesforce ensures platform-level security and internal backups, it is ultimately the user's responsibility to protect the data they store in the platform.

A good way to think about shared responsibility in the cloud is the relationship between a landlord and an apartment renter. The landlord is responsible for ensuring the roof doesn't leak, for example, and you're responsible for items inside the apartment.

How often should data be backed up?

The frequency of data backups should be determined by your business's specific needs and the volume of data changes. For critical data that undergoes frequent updates, daily backups are recommended. If you have data that changes by the minute or even the second, you may require a backup solution that captures data changes in near real-time.

Like we explained though, backup frequency depends on your specific needs. Not sure where to start? You’ll first want to establish these metrics: recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO).

While RTO focuses on how much downtime you can afford before business is impacted, RPO measures the amount of data your business can lose. To compute your RPO, examine your applications and decide how critical each data set is to daily operations. After performing this analysis, you can determine your organization’s RPO and how frequently you need to back up business data.

For example, if your systems back up at 9:00 p.m. every night and a failure occurs at midnight, you may not experience much data loss. A data loss event that happens in the middle of the day, on the other hand, can have significant consequences. With the proper RPO, you can protect vital information. 

How often is Salesforce backed up?

Many Salesforce users wonder, “How often does Salesforce back up data”? 

Salesforce provides a free Data Export Service (more details on this tool below), which allows you to generate backup files of your data weekly or monthly, depending on your edition. However, since the Data Export Service can only run once a week, you’ll lose data—potentially up to seven days' worth—that was changed or deleted between backups.

For this reason, supplementing with third-party backup solutions is recommended for more granular and frequent backups.

Is Salesforce automatically backed up?

Now that we’ve established that your Salesforce data needs to be backed up, the question is, is Salesforce doing that for you? The answer is nuanced. Salesforce performs data backups, but these are intended more for their internal disaster recovery processes rather than user-specific needs. 

There are other ways to back up your Salesforce data that allow you to access backups using standard Salesforce functionality. Let’s take a look at each solution’s benefits and limitations.

What are the limitations of Salesforce backup and restore native capabilities?

Data Loader

This client application, which is installed separately, enables you to export bulk records to comma-separated values (CSV) files. While it easily integrates with the Salesforce platform, the manual steps can be time-consuming and doesn’t support exporting attachments. 

Data Export Service

From the Salesforce UI, you can choose between manual or scheduled data backups exported into CSV. Data Export Service is limited to generating manual backup files: once every 7 days (for weekly export) or 29 days (for monthly export). Should you have a data incident in between your backups, you’re looking at days or weeks of missing or lost data—creating major disruption across teams and the business.  

Report Export

Using the reports interface, The Report Export allows you to easily export Salesforce data into a spreadsheet, with your choice of Microsoft Excel (.xlsx or .xls) files or CSV. Users like that it's native to Salesforce and easy to use but dislike the inability to export historical trending reports. 

Sandbox Refresh

Given that a Salesforce sandbox is a copy of your live production org, a sandbox refresh ensures that your metadata is copied in its latest form. Its complete isolation for your live org will give you peace of mind, but it does come with limitations: a full sandbox refresh can only happen once every 29 days, meaning that any changes between the last and next refresh won't be backed up.

Salesforce Backup

Salesforce introduced a new solution last year that has more robust functionality than its native offerings. While this solution does provide more capabilities, it likely will not meet many company’s requirements. Most notably, Salesforce’s backup solution fails to satisfy a long standing best practice of keeping your backups independent of your primary data. Storing both primary and backup data on the same platform can lead to potential risks, as any incident affecting the primary data, such as accidental deletion or a data breach, can also impact the backup data.

For these reasons, many businesses opt for more robust solutions available on the Salesforce AppExchange.

How to set up a Salesforce backup

Setting up a Salesforce backup involves several steps:

• Define Your Recovery Goals: Decide how much downtime your business can handle before it faces detrimental impacts (RTO) and how much data you are prepared to lose before it is deemed unacceptable (RPO).
• Identify Critical Data: Create a complete list of all data objects (e.g., Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities) stored in your Salesforce instance. Include any custom objects and fields you've created. Then determine what data needs to be protected.
• Choose a Backup Solution: Evaluate all of the key criteria for choosing a Salesforce backup and recovery tool. 
• Schedule Regular Backups: Configure the backup solution to perform regular, automated backups that meet your RTO and RPO goals.
• Test Backup and Restore Processes: Regularly test your backup and restore procedures to ensure data can be recovered promptly.

Why use Own for Salesforce

As the shared responsibility model clearly outlines, it’s up to you to proactively protect your important Salesforce data and metadata with a third-party backup and recovery solution. Independent backups ensure that your data is always accessible, regardless of what happens on your SaaS platform (like a service disruption). 

With so many backup and recovery solutions on the market, it’s critical to know how different backup vendors stack up. Own Recover for Salesforce provides automated backups of all your important data, metadata, and files,  proactively notifies you of data loss and corruption, and equips you with easy-to-use recovery tools. It’s the #1 rated backup and recovery solution on the Salesforce AppExchange, thanks to its ease of use and Own’s commitment to delivering an exceptional customer experience.

Own Recover offers several advantages:

• Automated Backups: Regular, automated backups ensure your data is consistently protected.
• Easy Restoration: Simplified restore processes enable quick recovery of data, minimizing downtime.
• Advanced Features: Compared to Salesforce's native tools, Own offers comprehensive data coverage and more flexible scheduling options.
• Compliance: Ensures compliance with industry regulations and standards, providing peace of mind.

Final thoughts

While Salesforce provides several ways to back up your data, they may not suffice for all business needs. It is crucial to understand the limitations and supplement with advanced backup solutions like Own. By doing so, you can ensure your data is secure, compliant, and readily recoverable. For more details on comprehensive data protection strategies, explore more content on salesforce data backup and restore here or request a demo below.