In the world of made up holidays, special events, and observances, World Backup Day has a special place in our hearts here at Own. According to the holiday’s official website, the day originated not from a backup and recovery company’s clever marketing campaign, but from concerned internet users asking the question, “What would you do if you lost everything?”
To avoid having to ask yourself that question, backing up your data is a necessary first step. But it’s far from the only step. Without having a way to recover your backed up data in the event of a loss or corruption, your backups are of little use. In light of this, we think “World Backup AND Recovery Day” might be a more appropriate name for this favorite holiday of ours.
So how exactly would one go about celebrating a fictitious World Backup and Recovery Day? If you’re a company that stores your data on the cloud, like in Salesforce, you might start by evaluating your current ability to recover your data.
Determining your recovery readiness
With all of the uncertainty of the past year, data recovery for SaaS applications has been top of mind more than ever before, forcing companies to think about how their operations would fare in the event of a data loss or corruption scenario.
As you evaluate your plan, two important metrics to define are your recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO).
What’s My Recovery Point Objective (RPO)? Your recovery point objective is there to determine how much data you are willing to lose. So if you’re using the weekly export service, you could lose seven days worth of data. Meaning all new records created or changes to existing records for that period would be lost.
What’s My Recovery Time Objective (RTO)? RTO is the timeframe by which you must restore after data loss or corruption has occurred. The goal here is for companies to calculate how fast they need to recover by preparing in advance. For example, if your company’s RTO objective is 48 hours, it means you must be able to restore data in less than two days.
Once you know the answers to these questions, you’ll be better prepared to evaluate various backup and recovery options.
When considering a data protection solution, look beyond backup
When choosing a backup and recovery solution, you need to make sure you’re getting both backup AND recovery capabilities for your Salesforce data. Having a copy of your data is important to meet the minimum standards of a backup. But the real challenge is the ability to restore the data back into Salesforce exactly how and when you need to.
Many Salesforce native options and DIY backup methods are serviceable as backup tools, but leave much to be desired when it comes to recovery. Even 3rd party solutions differ considerably in terms of their restore capabilities.
Here are a few key questions to ask potential vendors related to data recovery:
- Will the backup allow me to recover metadata in addition to data?
- Are we able to restore precise data, down to individual records or specific fields within records, as opposed to just restoring all of our data back to a set point in time?
- Will the recovery process automatically keep relationships between parent and child records intact?
- Does the option exist to selectively restore parent records without restoring child records?
Eliminate data downtime with Own
By backing up all of your Salesforce data, metadata, and attachments daily, Own minimizes the amount of data your organization will lose, or RPO, as well as the time it will take to recover, or RTO. Our High-Frequency Backup feature goes even further by backing up highly-transactional, frequently-changing data as often as every hour.
Own customers can also set up Smart Alerts, which notifies users when data is changed, deleted, or corrupted, based on their set rules or statistical outliers. Without it, the most common way Salesforce admins will learn about data loss or corruption incidents is from users or management, which could take weeks, months, or even longer.
To see how quickly Own can help customers recover lost Salesforce data watch the recording of our “Recover Challenge” event.
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