How Salesforce backup saved $36,000 in custom development

This is a Guest Post by Matthew Botos, Salesforce MVP, Technical Architect, and CTO of Salesforce Consulting Partner Alvorden, and contributing author of Force.com Developer Certification Handbook (DEV401).

I backup Salesforce for my consulting clients because I’ve seen $36,000 in custom development lost and $150 billion databases corrupted. Implementing backup of Salesforce data and metadata during consulting projects has prevented these costly losses and hours of rework.

Here are 3 of my true Salesforce backup rescue stories:

A new developer reset the Salesforce sandbox that 3 other developers were using, destroying $36,000 in custom code development. Rewriting and retesting the code would take weeks, and delay training and production deployment. Fortunately, my best practice of making a Salesforce data backup of metadata and code restored our progress in less than 1 day, saving the client $36,000 in rework.

Migrating and merging legacy AS/400 data into Salesforce should always be done in a Full Sandbox first. I drafted procedures for the data migration, executed them, and asked the business users to review the data quality. They asked for several systematic changes and a repeat of the data migration test.

I restored a Salesforce data backup of the sandbox which provided a consistent and repeatable test environment. This exhaustive testing prevented corruption of the production database containing $150 billion in purchasing data.

Salesforce only allows a refresh of your Full Sandbox every 30 days, which can delay testing and production deployments. During parallel Sales Cloud and Service Cloud deployments, this 30 day waiting period threatened to defer our User Acceptance Testing and more importantly, production launch.

I refreshed the sandbox myself with a Salesforce backup of production data and metadata, staying on schedule and on budget. Launching 30 days earlier increased the sales team’s revenue by an additional $22,500.

I backup Salesforce for my consulting clients to prevent costly losses and rework. In the 30 projects I’ve delivered over the past 5 years, Salesforce data backups have saved $36,000 in development rework, protected $150 billion in purchasing data, and accelerated deployments 30 days to increase revenue by $22,500.

I include Salesforce backups for free in all my consulting projects, and offer ongoing clients premium managed services for Salesforce data backups.