Patrick Shaw’s Weblog

One of the advantages of using a hosted solution such as Salesforce.com is that your vendor manages many of the update/backup/keep secure items that you’d have to manage if your software were installed on your computer or server.

Salesforce has a solid track record with all of those things and have a lot of redundancy -after all -their business model depends on you having access to your data!

At the same time - they’ve made it easy for you to get a backup of your data -and you should - that data most likely drives your important work, and having an additional layer of backup makes sense.

Some quick notes, though, about what you actually get (and what you don’t):

• You can request your data weekly in a CSV (comma separated value) file - but it isn’t incremental. That is, the data you get today is a full snapshot of your data. And if you get another snapshot next week - it’s also the whole enchilada - everything from last week, PLUS the changes. So you can’t “easily restore” just a few contact records without some hard work.
• We can’t help you easily integrate an older CSV file with your live data. If you remember your initial data migration process - this would be similar.
• We MAY be able to integrate a subset of data more easily.

Here’s how to request a backup:

1. Click on Setup | Administration Setup | Data Management | Data Export
2. Select the “Include attachments” check box (if desired).
3. Select any data that you would like to include by checking the box next to the name of the object. Selecting the “Include all data” box will include data from all tables.
4. Click the “Data Export” button

A confirmation email will be sent when the export has completed, with a link to the export files. Thanks to Chris Atwood at Salesforce for the how to steps!

When to Request a Backup:

• Just before you make a substantial change to your data!
• Weekly or monthly, depending on your internal IT practices
• Just before you ask a vendor to make modifcations or updates to your Salesforce instance.