Data management is one of the most crucial aspects of any Salesforce implementation. It is very important for the tailored Salesforce solutions where flawless mapping data is the key to Salesforce CRM success.
Salesforce does maintain its data copies, but when there is a case of any data loss, recovery can be costly and time-consuming with Salesforce’s native data recovery service. So, the organizations need to focus on a strong and continuous data backup strategy and recovery procedure to ensure data security.
Why do Organizations need a Data Recovery Plan?
Having a dedicated strategy for Salesforce data management will help streamline your business workflows. It is imperative to maintain data integrity to ensure effective rendering of all the processes and maintain relationships between data for better productivity. In comparison, aligning teams and individual teams with these strategies can also be overwhelming at the beginning.
A well-delineated data recovery plan will help you safeguard your valuable data for business administration and let the users element their data projects without any friction. In this article, we will further discuss some of the key data recovery and backup practices that will help reduce the risks related to the same and reduce any risks associated with improving business efficiency.
Understanding Data and Metadata
Many people are downplaying the need for metadata backup when they think of data backup and restoration plans. Data and metadata are different things in Salesforce. Data is a simple record of accounts, leads, contacts, etc. However, metadata is a configurable setting containing custom code of the pages, fields, reports, layouts, dashboards, etc. Any intentional or accidental change you make to this metadata is irreversible.
For this, it is critical to grant metadata permissions diligently and a metadata copy to be maintained for each restoration. Along with data recovery, you need to give careful consideration to Salesforce metadata backup and recovery too. There are many articles discussing salesforce data recovery and backup online with which you will have a better understanding of this topic.
AppExchange
Salesforce is a cloud-based CRM and offers many add-on apps to do more things with it. These are available at AppExchange, which is the Salesforce marketplace for custom apps. App Exchange is one major reason why Salesforce remains the No. 1 cloud CRM lately.
AppExchange users can make use of it for data and metadata backup too. You can find plenty of data backup and restoration tools on AppExchange; however, you must choose the best one based on your specific use case’s needs and other user reviews. Most of these apps are plug-and-play with customizable features and capacities.
Confirming Data Loss
Salesforce is fully data-driven in which the customer engagements are derived based on the insights from the historical data. This further makes corrupted or missing data a very undesirable scenario, spoiling the entire Salesforce ecosystem. Missing data may further mislead the customer strategies and adversely impact the organization’s reputation in the longer run. So, the users must confirm any data loss with their admins to ensure an internal troubleshooting process. Some of the important aspects to take care of are:
- Change the data sharing rules – The system admins may change some data sharing rules, further restricting the view for various users.
- Using global search – Users may also check if the records are accessible through the global search. Sometimes, their records may be re-parented, so the users with limited permissions may not view those.
- View All access of records – If there is any data loss reported by preliminary troubleshooting, the ‘View All’ may further confirm it. The users having viewed all access
- Users with the ‘View All’ permissions may also access every record and can confirm if there is any data loss.
Different Backup Methods
Once a data loss is identified and confirmed, the crucial next process is finding the most appropriate backup solutions. There are various methods to check for data backups, and the most simplified option is to use the recycle bin. If you are on salesforce UI, you can go to the deleted records in the recycle bin.
You can easily and instantly restore the records by choosing the undelete option. However, the users may not that Salesforce may not permit direct restoration of multiple records at a time. Multiple records in the recycle bin can only be restored using API, Sandbox, etc.
Using data loader – You can also purge multiple records by using the export all functions. This is ideal for records not being visible in the recycle bin and can only be viewed when these are accessed through the data loader. Admins can access it and can later recreate the records by using the data loader.
Have a Proper Strategy to Import Challenges
Importing the data records come with many challenges. If you know about them then you can deal with this in a better manner. You can have a system in place to deal with them whenever it occurs. Some of the major ones among these are.
- Mapping the unique IDs of new records with the old records.
- Replacing the previous existing IDs with fresh IDs. It can also be done using the VLOOKUP features of excel by creating some external ID fields.
- The users also must remember the fact that data recovery is a costly and time-consuming process.
Every enterprise using Salesforce needs to have a data backup and recovery protocol, which needed to be strictly adhered to. This has to be paired with a proper data usage policy and user-base data access privileges. By following the latter, the possibility of data loss can be kept minimal, so they need data recovery.
With the use of Salesforce data recovery, you can recover data for a total of 3 months period. The recovery process itself may take about seven to eight weeks. Many good third-party Salesforce integration services promise more efficient and cost-effective ways of data backup and recovery.
Also, Read 5 Reasons Why We Need to Use Analytics in Business
