Do you backup your Salesforce data?
No matter where you store your data, it is always good practice to maintain backups. After all, it is your data and you need to be responsible for it, although we trust 3rd parties to keep it safe and backed up for us too.
When it comes to Salesforce, are you maintaining backups? If so, how? Please comment and enlighten the community on some good options you’ve deployed. Some that spring to mind for me are:
- Weekly Data Export - Inside Salesforce, Enterprise and Unlimited Edition customers (for a fee, Professional Edition can do this) can request a weekly export of their data. The result is a ZIP of CSV files containing the raw data for each Salesforce object.
- Custom Script - Write custom code to access Salesforce via the API and grab all the data into your own database. Mike Simonds has some scripts to help get you started if you use PHP.
- AppExchange Application - Use an AppExchange application to do the dirty work to automate this process. Visit the AppExchange to read about the various solutions.
- Sesame Software - I find this tool very easy to use and can get your Salesforce data into Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, etc. in a hurry.
- CRM Fusion - They have a feature to backup your data directly into MS Access.
- Other Data Loading/Moving Tool - Pervasive, Informatica, Bluewolf, Apatar and others have solutions to move data from place to place with a connector to Salesforce built in.
- Do Nothing - Let Salesforce take care of it. They have a proven track record of keeping your data from disaster.
- Something else?
I wish I personally had a better answer, but I am currently using the “Do Nothing” approach and occasionally make backups to MS Access using Demand Tools “just in case”.
How about you? Experiences, recommendations and general thoughts are welcome in the comments.
(posts)
Pete 'Fifedog' Fife Said,
April 28, 2008 @ 4:50 pm
Well I’m in the same boat. I trust Salesforce’s multi-million dollar investments to keep our data safe from natural disaster. However natural disasters don’t include me having a brain fart.
Therefore anytime I do a massive change to data I hit the weekly export. Or maybe at the end of quarter maybe a good idea.
Rhonda Ross Said,
April 28, 2008 @ 6:54 pm
I’ve use the weekly export and used to do it religiously every week — until the volume of data became too time-consuming for this method. Clicking each file link to save locally was taking me way too long. So now I do it monthly now. There have been several times that I did need to actually go back to some data from the backup — to undue some unintended opportunity ownership changes after rolling out territory management (despite all of our sandbox tests), and sometimes just to look up how some data was at a historical point in time. The “do nothing” option only protects you from the natural disasters.
Bryan B. Said,
April 28, 2008 @ 8:04 pm
I use the weekly backup along with hoping that nothing ever goes wrong. Having been reminded that a backup is only as good as the ability to restore it, I tried to restore from the weekly backup — and realized it isn’t easy. Following that, I tried the trial version of DemandTools’ export to Access option, which was pretty slick and surprisingly small.
On a side note, it seems that Salesforce has changed some of the policies on the Data Export function. It used to be that one only had 3 days to export the zipped data file. That no longer seems to be the case.
R_LHR Said,
April 29, 2008 @ 4:13 am
I used to use various shades of these methods. Salesforce takes care of the heavy disaster recovery for you and that’s wonderful. But they can’t guard you against your users’ tampering or against accidental user errors. You will find Salesforce.com VERY unsympathetic in these instances.
A method of backup we tried was to write a polling application that called the Salesforce.com API every few minutes to ask for changes to each object’s data, then post these changes to a local MySQL database.
This is an ok way to do things as it will even retain the rows you’ve deleted from Salesforce.com if you configure it to.
In the end, this became too much of a bother for developers to support and maintain, so I subscribed to a service that already sells this type of application and supplies technical support for it.
This is lovely because I can point reporting tools at this data repository to get around the limitations of reporting features in Salesforce, but it comes with yet another annual pricetag. It’s one of those “hidden costs” that Salesforce.com deny exist among its users.
There are at least two Salesforce.com partner vendors selling these solutions. You can decide which one you’d rather buy from based on a number of factors (price, offering, viability of the underlying company, ease of use, etc). I think the big two companies have similar pricing. I haven’t checked to see if there were others selling something similar.
Chris Said,
April 29, 2008 @ 8:16 am
I trust Salesforce’s investments in data security too, but that they only protect against Salesforce corrupting or losing data. If you corrupt or lose your own data, that’s a different story. Well-meaning (and ill-meaning) users can mess up data in all kinds of creative ways. Pete, you summed it up beautifully: “…natural disasters don’t include me having a brain fart.”
I work for Bluewolf and we’re big fans of our Replicator product on the AppExchange . You can easily pop all or some of your data (certain objects, deltas since the last dump, or other criteria you set) into Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase, or mySQL databases.
But unlike the weekly export, you can run it every day, and set it to run automatically. The “set it and forget it” feature has bailed out many of our customers and saved them some serious cash and heartaches from dealing with Salesforce to roll back their data (which they will do, but not on the cheap).
Bill Emerson Said,
April 29, 2008 @ 6:06 pm
Over 300 customers (www.forceamp.com/clients.htm) use DBAmp to backup their salesforce data to SQL Server.
Chris 2 Said,
May 1, 2008 @ 7:45 pm
This is the “poor man’s script”, but it works for me - I have an Outlook reminder that pops up once every 2 weeks to remind me to back up my data.
Disclaimer: People will mock you for living your life through Outlook.
Rhonda Ross Said,
May 2, 2008 @ 11:12 pm
Good news!
Just learned that in Summer ‘08 you will be able to schedule backups to run automatically at weekly or monthly intervals, at the time of day of your choice. As in previous releases, the minimum time interval between backups will be six days.
To schedule export files for backup, you will go to Setup ➤ Data Management ➤ Data Export and click Schedule Export.
Tomasz O Said,
May 19, 2008 @ 2:29 am
With Summer 08 release …. weekly export can be now scheduled!
===================================
Scheduled Data Export
Data Export allows you to create backup files of your data. In previous releases, you could manually initiate the backup process once per week. In Summer ‘08 you can now schedule backups to run automatically at weekly or monthly intervals, at the time of day of your choice. As in previous releases, the minimum time interval between backups is six days.
To schedule export files for backup, go to Setup ? Data Management ? Data Export and click Schedule Export.
If Data Export is not enabled for your organization, contact salesforce.com.
Cloud(s), Hype, and Freedom - BuzzYA! Said,
October 14, 2008 @ 6:45 am
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