Why Data Backup Should Be Part Of Your Salesforce Deployment Process

If you’re a Salesforce admin or developer who has spent hours using spreadsheets or Data Loader to move data between your Salesforce environments, you know what a time-consuming and tedious process it can be. And because Salesforce is a relational database, it increases the complexity of moving all the related child objects and fixing any look-up relationships.

Fortunately, there are tools to make this process easier. In this blog, we’ll highlight how OwnBackup’s integration with Copado can help you confidently move data across your Salesforce orgs, from development to QA, to UAT, to production.

Copado’s Data Deploy tool does exactly what you’d think-it moves data from one org to another. A popular use case for Data Deploy is moving configuration records (e.g., Salesforce CPQ, nCino, Veeva). However, while Copado tracks changes to metadata, it does not track changes to data. So, with a deployment like CPQ, how can you know what your data looks like before and after the deployment? OwnBackup can help.

Within the Copado application, you can add URL callouts to the OwnBackup API to run a backup on selected objects both before and after the deployment. Doing this will allow for an easy comparison of the two points in time to identify all differences pre and post-deployment. Thus giving you source control for your data.

Using OwnBackup, you can quickly see how many records were added, changed, or removed and view the status of each object at the time of the backup. This is an excellent way to find all records that were added, deleted, or changed, which is especially valuable after a deployment.

On the compare screen, you can see when updates occurred, but more importantly, view the detail of those changes. For a CPQ project, for example, you can drill into the Price Book Entries object to see the modified individual records. The ability to identify the changes at the record level and for each field ensures that all data modifications are tracked.

Using OwnBackup, you can monitor your deployments with Smart Alerts for any unexpected changes or issues. Within the Recover application, you can customize alerts to uncover significant changes to specific objects and the number of records added, removed, or modified. So, instead of having to look for changes, the Smart Alerts will proactively notify you when the predefined conditions are met.

If you identify an issue after a deployment, you can recover data quickly. Restore the exact data you need from any backup in your history without affecting valid data added since the backup occurred. Plus, your data relationships remain intact regardless of how many levels deep they go.

Deploying code is inherently risky, and bad code could be the source of a devastating disruption to the business. Without a disciplined process for testing and delivery, or the safeguards in place to quickly recover in the event of data loss or corruption, deploying code between Salesforce orgs can be risky.

Copado and OwnBackup enable more efficient, higher-quality releases so that delivery teams can deploy confidently. By minimizing both the risk and cost associated with user-inflicted data loss or corruption, this integration drives rapid innovation and, ultimately, faster time-to-value for customers.