Plan Your Salesforce Backup Strategy
To create high-value and time-efficient policies, make a plan for identifying and prioritizing the data that you want to back up. Then make sure that users have access to the objects that store data and build your backup policy in batches.
Required Editions
| Available in: Lightning Experience |
| Available in: Professional, Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited Editions with the Salesforce Backup & Recover add-on license. |
Follow these tips to make the most of your team’s time, increase your successful backup rate, and spend less time fine-tuning your backup policy.
Identify and Prioritize the Data That You Want to Back Up
Most customers have specific goals for backing up data. Some customers want to keep backups for security purposes, while others aim to meet compliance requirements for certain categories of data, such as health data. Whatever your goals, it’s important to know what information is most important to your security and compliance posture.
Talk with your team to identify high, medium, and low-priority data for backup. Then identify and list the objects that contain that data.
Give Authorized Users Access to Object
The Salesforce Backup app respects object access rules and only acts on objects that you have access to. Without full object access, backups don’t complete or aren’t available for restoration later. Most backup and restore issues stem from incorrect object access settings.
After you have a prioritized list of objects, make sure that integration users have access to them.
- Assign read access to all objects that you plan to back up.
- Make sure that you meet all special access rules. For example, some objects are only available in specific products or when features within those products are enabled. Review the Special Access Rules section of the object reference documentation for the licenses, permissions, and preferences that each object requires.
- Custom objects, including custom objects in managed packages, must be available site-wide.
Users must have all levels of access before an object can be backed up. See the Special Access section on each object’s entry in the Object Reference for the Salesforce Platform guide.
To confirm and modify object access, use the Object Manager and Profile pages in Setup along with the User Licenses related list on the Company Information page.
Follow Up After You Restore Data
As you plan what data to back up, it’s a good idea to set aside time to review the data after you restore it. Evaluating restored data not only helps you validate your backup strategy, but it also helps you stay on top of important data cleansing and maintenance tasks.
For example, you can back up and restore share object data. If you changed your share settings between the time that a share object was backed up and restored, restoring that share object can introduce unwanted object access settings. After you restore shared objects, revisit those objects’ manual sharing settings or Apex share settings and verify that they adhere to your current object access policies.
