Planning Salesforce data backup and Restoration – Some Important Things to Know

How will you be able to restore your org after any data loss instance? You may not be having any viable options other than backing up your data and the metadata to restore it in case of any data loss. To do this, the first thing to start with is to back up your org. However, even when you have a proper backup in place, one must think about your restoration process ahead of any data loss incident. 

Whenever you find yourself needing to restore huge amounts of data, there are chances that you will be working under pressure to repair your org quickly. Stressedadmins may not make the best decision in case of any unexpected data accident. So, it is essential to prepare an action plan and keep it running in place to restore the data in case of any adversities. With this plan in place, you will not be in a crisis ever.

Manual backup versus backup solution

It is important to consider how you backup your data and metadata and how it will be affecting the restoration of your org. It is also important to consider how well you can do it in case of adversities. When it comes to data backup and restoration, it is possible to restore the data from manual backup. However, doing so is a bit complicated than restoring the org with a backup solution. At every stage of the restoration process, teams using the backup solutions may significantly outperform the teams using manual data backups.For this, you need to understand the restoration process well and plan it based on your specific use case. Let us explore this in more detail as below.

The restoration process

Assessing your damage

Probably one of the worst things to do after any data loss is to rush in and start restoring the data right away. If you don’t understand the course and scope of the data loss, your org may be making the matter worsethan securing what data has been lost. So, the first thing to ensure in case of a data loss is to identify its cause and eliminate it at the first point. Once this is in place, you are ready to assess the extent and the possibility of the damage, which may happen. You also have to doubt sure that you know exactly what is lost or got corrupted. Consider which data sets and which all items in the metadata have the risks. You should also assess the backups in advance to verify that the latest backup was successful and the data you are trying to restore is sound. If you have various backups from different data points, then identify which backup you have to use?

If you are backing up the data and metadata manually and assessing your backups, you may do it by clicking around to understand what is missing. In this attempt, you may be failing to notice many things, for which you want to use some tools which you can create some custom reports. This data will say the overall number of records and whether it is okay to proceed with it. 

There are many free and open-source tools available for Salesforce data backup and restore, with which you can take the best approach to data backup and restoration on Salesforce. The third-party Salesforce backup solutions may also help to identify the exact metadata which is lost. You will be able to analyze the data loss with these tools by looking at the backup tasks and digging into various objects to the granular level.

Data management services

Data management services also offer some comparison tools, which will show you the exact differences between metadata and your backups in the org. With the help of these tools, one can also be sure that you identify everything needed to restore data when needed.

If you are planning to get the metadata restored, then you have to restore it first. Next, you have to restore the data. Try to break down the process into two different manageable sections. If you are looking to restore too much data in one go, it may often result in error messages. To avoid this, it is ideal to start with restoring smaller portions at a time, making it easier for you to identify the root cause of the problem and the need to troubleshoot as you go. Many errors can be avoided by working out logically by first restoring the core objects and then the records depending on the same. If you need to restore a lot of metadata, the best approach is usually to restore the subsets of metadata in the below approach.

• Data-tier– This is a core component in the data structure. This is something on top of which most of the data customizations are built. Custom fields, custom objects, custom apps, value sets, and clicks are built on this.

• Programmability – The custom code you have built on top of this platform includes everything as classes, tests, components, and triggers.

• Presentation– Modifications may get changed as to how the end-users may interact with the platform.For example, Lightning pages, Visualforce, layouts, components, etc.

• The security model and permissions – Metadata controls user access to data as profiles, field-level security, permission sets, security settings, sharing rules, etc.

• Others– Any e of the other components or types of data. This may include email templates, static resources reports, flowcharts, workflows, and documents, etc.

If you have to restore a lot of data, say, for example, more than 100,000 records, then it may be a good idea to break this into small silos. This way, you will be able to depend on your backups more. If you are restoring it manually from your backups, you have to accept that you have exported it from Salesforce, and you may want to follow the Salesforce advice to plan the migrations. 

Salesforce recommends working through the objects in order like users, accounts campaigns, contacts, opportunities cases, price books, products, leads, contracts, and so on. The major problem with this approach is that there are many complicated relationships between these different types of records.After you restore the data to all the objects; you may need to restore all the data relationships manually. This may be an additional step that will take a lot of time and effort.

The third-party backup solutions can handle all these complexities well on your behalf. With the use of the best third-party backup and restoration tools, you will be able to easily backup Salesforce data to multiple objects at once, and then it can be easily restored when you need it.