Protect data and metadata for all your Salesforce environments with automated backups and precision recovery tools that give you full control, every step of the way.
Highlights
- Easy setup and unlimited backup storage.
- Proactively monitor data changes with Smart Alerts.
- Visual Precision Repair tool to restore corrupted data or fully recover lost data.
- Stay compliant with retention policies for each connected ‘service’.
Protecting the data and metadata in your Salesforce instance as your organization grows can quickly turn into a hassle. Out-of-the-box options, such as the weekly, monthly, or on demand data export, are likely to be insufficient for supporting your needs.
The sheer amount of information across all objects a Salesforce backup can contain, including personally identifiable information (PII) and sensitive financial data, requires a fast, compliant, and easy-to-set-up solution.
OwnBackup Recover is an established data backup and restore solution that works closely with the Salesforce platform, among many other ‘services’ (connections with other applications in your tech stack). We’ll dive into what OwnBackup has to offer, the ideal use cases, and setup effort – but functionality aside, their transparent pricing (which isn’t based on data volume) gives OwnBackup customers the peace of mind that there won’t be any surprise costs!
By the end of this in-depth overview, you’ll see just how backup and restore challenges will become a thing of the past.
Features
While we will be focusing on the functionalities OwnBackup offers for backup and restore processes for Salesforce instances, you can choose to back up other SaaS applications in your tech stack.
OwnBackup is its own web-based application (not embedded within Salesforce). Keeping backup access off-platform (separate from your Salesforce database) will ensure business continuity, should any unexpected Salesforce service disruptions occur.
Access different actions to take on both data and metadata once logged into the OwnBackup web-based platform:
Services are the connections with the systems you’d like to back up the data or metadata:
Data: Backup, Find, Restore, and Compare
Data is definitely the first thing that comes to mind when talking about backup processes. This is especially true in relation to an application, such as Salesforce, where users as well as different integrations modify data every single day.
Ownbackup, of course, offers backup from any type of Salesforce instance (production, sandbox, or even developer edition). To make this point clear, you now have centralized access to backups for multiple orgs.
Backup
As well as the automatic daily backup, the capability for on-demand backups, gives admins the flexibility required.
There’s a daily backup cadence for each service, and you can choose the exact time for this to happen. You can also select a “full backup day” – with the daily backup, only the data that has changed since the last backup will be considered.
If daily backups are not sufficient, you can trigger on-demand backups that are either based on specific objects or a full backup:
To make your experience even better, exports can be scheduled for third-party targets such as MySQL, Snowflake, AWS S3 buckets and Azure blobs (if you wish):
Find
The ability to search through data is essential. OwnBackup make this possible for record data and attachments – across any of your connected ‘services’ within:
- A particular backup (available only for record search).
- A certain time frame, which may include various backups (available only for record search).
- All backups (available for both record and attachment search).
Moreover, OwnBackup will not only search attachments using the attachment’s name, but also the actual content of the attachment (providing it’s in one of the supported formats shown in the image below).
Restore
An obvious reason to back up is to restore records to a previous state if unintended changes happen, either due to user error, integrations, or in-org automations.
Everything present in one of the backups can be restored, if needed, even if the record/s were modified or deleted altogether. Compared to the out-of-the-box Salesforce Recycle Bin, there is no time or volume constraint as to when you can recover the deleted data.
When it comes to potential data loss, choose from any standard or custom objects – attachments included. You can also choose related objects. For example, the below restore job will get records from both the Lead object as well as Account Contact Roles.
Compare
As time goes on, more daily backups will start to pile up. The need to compare data between a certain service with a backup, or between backups from different services, becomes a must-have.
OwnBackup offers a very detailed way to compare between snapshots, as the breakdown includes counts for anything that was removed, added, or changed:
Data can be restored directly from the results of the comparison, removing the need to go through the Restore tab separately.
OwnBackup also ensures Salesforce dependencies aren’t forgotten, as you will be alerted that configuration steps are required before the data can be accepted into the destination org.
Precision Repair
In addition to the above mechanism for restoring data, OwnBackup also offers a visual Precision Repair tool. Clicking on an object name from the Compare report brings up a visual tool where you can review record deletions and record changes for the object.
You can add multiple filters, including AND / OR filter logic, to narrow down the search to only display records which meet certain criteria. Also, after filters are applied, unchanged records fields can be hidden from the view.
Once the records to be restored are identified, they need to be selected and added to the Restore Bucket. In the example below, an administrator has mistakenly deleted the ContactId from a couple Cases while updating the records through an import – after identifying them, the restore can be previewed and completed in a few moments.
The Precision Repair tool provides a very convenient way to visually narrow down just the unwanted changes you want to restore, while leaving valid object changes untouched.
Data Protection and Retention Policies
Compliance must be considered and designed into all platforms that store or process data – backups are no exception.
Set up data retention policies for each service, making it easy to control what happens to large data volumes at the end of the defined time frame.
For each service’s homepage, there is a GDPR specific option where records can be forgotten in bulk, one by one, and even rectified.
Smart Alerts: Proactively Monitor Data Changes
It’s always a good idea to keep a close eye on data changes happening in your Salesforce org. Large data volumes make it hard to spot anomalies, and malicious activity is designed to be hard to detect.
Proactively monitor data changes with Smart Alerts. You can choose to be notified whenever records are:
- Added
- Removed
- Changed
In the example below, a notification will be sent out to me, the admin, as soon as more than 123 Account records have been deleted. Keep in mind that alerts can be based on record counts or percentages (e.g. send a notification when > 30% of Task records are changed).
Metadata
Paying attention to metadata backup drastically reduces the impact of errors which can affect either a sandbox or production environment.
Similar to data, metadata changes can also be identified and restored, if required. This is especially important if you don’t have another version control system in place.
To compare and restore metadata changes gives the necessary insight, especially since some changes are not available in the Setup Audit Trail (e.g. detailed layout changes).
By default, every time a metadata restore job is completed (related to any service, be it data or metadata) an email notification will be sent out.
Sandbox Seeding (and Data Anonymization)
This is an additional product available at an extra cost, however, Sandbox Seeding is definitely worth mentioning, especially as it will prove helpful for Salesforce Admins along the way.
Whenever something is built in a sandbox, it also needs to be thoroughly tested. Data is often involved especially when testing automations or calculations based on related records.
OwnBackup’s enhanced sandbox seeding process ensures you can prepare a sandbox with ample record data in little time.
Seeding
Control which object records you’ll be targeting to send to the sandbox, as well as any related parent/child records. You can filter directly on the chosen object, for example, filtering to only include Accounts with a certain Industry value.
Salesforce Admins will be very happy to have a choice of Seeding Method, plus the option to disable the automations (validation rules included) in the target with just a click of a box.
Data Anonymization
Anonymizing sandbox data is highly recommended to ensure compliance.
In the example below, field values are replaced with random text, but could also be anonymized using a value from another field, or simply blanked out.
Backup Analytics
When opening any service, the landing page will show an overall dashboard. See insights into the latest backups, plus a comprehensive way to filter the information.
The filters available (shown above) will display a breakdown of the total number of changes within the time frame, along with the count for every type of action – be it changes, updates or deletions, applied to your service.
Impact
Considering OwnBackup’s wide range of functionalities, it is bound to have a positive impact on any system, especially with:
- Preventing data loss (see “Use Cases” section)
- Compliance
- Avoiding data corruption (see “Use Cases” section)
Use Cases
For any organization, their tech stack is only as good as its answer to critical business problems – either fixing or preventing them. OwnBackup tackles both sides of the coin by offering the possibility of “precision repair”, ensuring an end-to-end, risk-free experience.
Data loss is commonly caused by data clean up using deduplication scripts (or manually), resulting in the wrong criteria being applied. Precision repair offers a valuable level of control over anything that has been backed up and might be at risk of corruption in the production instance.
- Restore merged records: When a master record is selected, the non-surviving records from the merge are deleted. If this ever happens without a backup, the chances are that the record/s won’t ever be recovered.
- Parent and child record deletion: Such as Contacts in case of Account deletion.
- Avoid data corruption: Corruption may impact only certain records and/or fields (while other records have been valid updates). Identify and restore only the unwanted changes, which will be possible after the job is completed and differences can be checked in detail.
When talking about corruption, this might not refer to data alone, but also metadata as well. I’m sure all of us have been in a situation where a user made unwanted dashboard or report changes that resulted in additional manual work for the admin to recreate – they may not have been in the full copy sandbox, or perhaps a copy didn’t exist.
Even in this case, the corruption can be easily fixed from one of the snapshots from before the change was made, saving crucial time to be better spent elsewhere.
Setup
After going through all the main features OwnBackup has to offer, you might think the setup will require a significant time investment. From my experience, the hard part about the setup is knowing what you need backup for; once you’re familiar with your specific use cases, then you’ll be up and running in no time.
Within moments, you will see that creating backup services for data and metadata is intuitive.
The jobs completion progress will become available, so you can keep an eye on multiple service backups happening simultaneously.
Support
Support is sometimes required even when the setup and available documentation are easy to digest, and OwnBackup is committed to providing stellar customer and prospect support for any question you might have.
At the top of every page in OwnBackup there’s a ‘lifeline’ hiding access to Help & Support options, including the possibility to “Submit a Case”.
Pricing
As with all of the features and functionalities the OwnBackup platform offers, pricing information is transparent. Detailed views of each item included in the product you choose (as well as the cost / user / month) can be accessed directly from the pricing page from their website.
OwnBackup does not charge based on backup retention or data volume, meaning there are no surprise costs!
Summary
OwnBackup is a provider you can trust with your backups and data security, and a great ally for anything related to data manipulation, such as sandbox seeding or knowing when your data suffers changes.
Don’t hesitate to see all of the above features in action by requesting a demo tailored to your organization’s specific needs.