Use comprehensive data backup service for your business

If your business relies on its sales data to run, the last thing you want is for it to be lost. If you have a large amount of data, you should consider backing up to the Salesforce Backup Service. This service protects your organization's information by providing backups automatically with no user intervention required. At the same time, there are some free options out there or plans that start at about $10 per month. This article will cover how the Salesforce Backup Service manages your backup schedule and what happens during a backup job.

To understand how this service works, first think about what you do when your PC starts up. Windows uses something called Volume Shadow Copy, which allows an open application to access other files. At the same time, they are being modified without causing any issues, and it also allows the system to make a backup copy of your machine before anything changes. This way, if something does go wrong during a boot-up, all you have to do is restore from your backup, and you're quickly back in business with Salesforce data backup service.

Salesforce Backup Service uses a similar technology called SAN Copy, which works in a very similar fashion using Volume Shadow Copy technology on a shared storage volume that has been configured for SAN use.

SAN Copy

It lets Salesforce Backup Service schedule automatic backups of your organization's data by taking advantage of the Windows Volume Shadow Copy service on servers with designated shared storage volumes (e.g., EMC or NetApp). Because it can access any file without opening the file, SAN Copy can create a volume snapshot at any moment in time. That way, it's possible to restore your data to any point in the past without having to worry about all the changes that occurred between then and now.

Each organization you connect to the Salesforce backup service is assigned one or more shared storage volumes on which backups are stored for recovery purposes. These volumes must be large enough to hold multiple backups per week (depending on how often you would like them created). For example, suppose you configure Salesforce Backup Service with an organization for a daily backup. In that case, 5 weekly backup copies are required, totaling approximately 260GB of disk space used by the service per year. If your organization was configured for monthly backups, only 20GB of disk space would be required per year.

The Salesforce Backup Service

It creates a series of full snapshots that contain all your organization data for each assigned backup schedule you have configured on a shared storage volume. These snapshots are then converted into archive files on the assigned volume. The conversion process compresses the snapshot data into smaller, easily transportable archive files that can be readily restored later when needed. Once an archived file has been created, it is held on the shared storage volume until it expires (which happens 7 days after creation). At this point, it is automatically deleted to make room for additional backups. This ensures that there's always enough free space on your assigned volumes for daily or weekly backup processing while ensuring the security of your archived files.

The following backup schedules are available

Daily backups every day, a new full backup is created, and any previous daily backups older than 7 days are deleted. The shared storage volume(s) holding the daily backups contains one full backup per day, which means that up to 7 days worth of data can be held before all daily backups expire. Weekly backups Every Sunday, a new full backup is created, and the oldest weekly backup from any assigned organization is deleted. In addition, after a full backup has been taken on Saturday night, all daily backups older than 1 week will be deleted organization's data.

It means that a shared storage volume can hold up to 14 weekly backups before old backups start being deleted. Monthly backups Every first day of the month, a full backup is created, and all monthly backups older than 4 months are deleted. In addition, after a full backup has been taken on the last day of the month, any daily or weekly backup from an organization assigned to this service backed up within 2 weeks will be deleted. So if you have two organizations assigned to this service for a total of 3 organizations' data, only 10 monthly backups will be allowed per shared storage volume before old backups start being deleted.

Monthly global snapshots

Every first day of the month, a new snapshot is created and then rotated out every 7 days after that until all monthly snapshots older than 4 months are deleted. This snapshot is automatically applied to each organization assigned to this service, which can be used for backup and restore purposes.

Monthly global full backups

Once a month, a new full backup is created and rotated out every 7 days after that until all monthly full backups older than 12 months are deleted. This backup cannot be restored independently; instead, you must restore the most recent global snapshot or one of the organizations assigned to this service. You can only assign one organization at a time to this type of schedule. Still, the volume doesn't have to be dedicated exclusively for that purpose since no organization data will ever be stored there. It's intended for use when restoring an all-or-nothing copy of an organization's data.

Custom schedules

You can also schedule backups for any combination of daily, weekly, and monthly schedules with up to 10 different varieties. For example, you might set up one custom schedule that includes daily backups from the last week and monthly backups from each assigned organization. Custom backup schedules do not expire like other backup schemes; they only change when you manually modify them.

Complete sales force data backup service allows you to create backups on a shared storage volume to restore your organization's data if necessary. Custom schedules currently only support complete and snapshot backups. You can't use them to create incremental or differential backups. Backup programs offer both daily and weekly options, along with custom combinations of each so that you can configure Salesforce Data Backup Service for your needs.