Everywhere you turn, stories about business continuity, disaster recovery, and IT resilience seem to be popping up. While these terms aren’t interchangeable, there is a constant component in each one: backup and recovery.

In a recent Forrester Research Report, Analyst Naveen Chhabra made the case for why backup and recovery is such an important topic right now. Chhabra explains that today’s businesses are more data-driven than ever before, making the impact of data loss or corruption all the more crippling. Chhabra also states that the way to mitigate these impacts is to have a comprehensive data management strategy, at the heart of which includes a data backup and recovery solution.

Native backup options offered by Salesforce

Salesforce recommends using a partner backup solution that can be found on the AppExchange. The reason they recommend this is almost entirely due to the challenges most experience when attempting to recover lost or corrupted data using native backup methods.

Weekly Export

One of the most common of these methods is the weekly export, which allows users to generate backup CSV files of their data on a weekly basis (once every six days) or on-demand via user-generated reports. The export can be scheduled and then manually downloaded when ready. In the event of a user-inflicted data loss, users must manually restore by uploading their CSV files in the correct order.

Because this process can be challenging, you can learn more in our ebook, 7 Steps to Recovering Lost Data Using Salesforce Weekly Export.

Data Loader

Data Loader is another tool that can be used to back up your data. It can be used through the user interface to bulk import or export Salesforce records through CSV files, as well as Insert, Update, Upsert, Delete or Export Salesforce records as CSV files. Similar to the Weekly Export, restoration of lost or corrupted data using Data Loader would be manual.

When considering a data protection solution, look beyond backup

The key takeaway for organizations is that you need to have both a backup AND recovery strategy in place for your Salesforce data. Having a copy of your data is important to meet the minimum standards of a backup.

But the real challenge is the ability to restore the data back into Salesforce exactly how and when you need to. In order to do this, you must test your strategy so you’ll be aware of what will actually happen if you were to experience a data loss or corruption.

When testing, check:

• Are you able to recover specific versions of document or data or metadata?
• Are you able to minimize data transformation during the restoration process?
• How does your strategy handle different types of restore processes?
• What is the performance and time to restore?

There’s clearly a lot to consider here. But shifting your focus from the "backup" portion to the much more difficult and important topic of "recovery" will lead you to more modern, forward-thinking approaches to recovering from data loss.

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