As the admin of salesforce.com, you are responsible for the integrity of the system for your organization. That means that you need to make sure that your system is up and running properly at all times. Sometimes it is out of your control because salesforce.com might be experiencing a rare problem. But for the most part, how accessible your data is and how it is viewed by your users is up to you.
A best practice to get in the habit off is to back up all of your data on a regular basis. This is very simple to do through the setup area in salesforce.com. Simply go to Setup-Data Management-Data Export and click the Data Export button.
Here is what the page should look like.
In my organization, I make a back up of our data every Monday morning. I save a copy on the server (which is backed up every night) and I burn a copy on a disk to be stored off sight. This provides me a peace of mind. I am not worried about salesforce.com loosing all of its data. I am more worried about deleting data that we will need in the future. Having the back ups make it easy to get at the data if something were to be lost.
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November 13, 2007 at 3:26 pm
Johan Liljegren
“[...] burn a copy on a disk [...]“?
Wow, our data export is roughly 20 Gb. I keep one copy on my desktop computer and one on our server (with daily backup). I delete old exports whenever I feel the need for some harddrive space. I currently have about 2 months of exports stored.
In my almost 1 year as an SFDC admin, I’ve yet to actually use them, i.e. importing something that someone deleted. However, I sleep better knowing it’s there. =)
Oh, and we almost don’t allow anyone apart from us sysadmins to delete stuff, that might be why we’ve never had to use it. We never do anything wrong!
November 14, 2007 at 9:26 am
Matt
Thanks for the comment Johan and for sharing what you are doing. I am glad that you have not had to use the back up yet.
February 28, 2008 at 2:36 pm
Anonymous
Is there a difference between “data export” and “back-up”, or is this one in the same ?? We are looking to reduce the amount of SF data storage since we are at approx 92+% storage at the moment. If we “export” and/or “backup” our data on a weekly basis, how will this lower our current storage percentage?
February 28, 2008 at 3:14 pm
Matt
The only difference between data export and backup is creating a backup means saving the data export. None of this reduces storage, in only provides you with your date if anything were to happen to Salesforce.com
In order to reduce storage, you can archive date. This means identifying old data in the system that is not needed regularly and backing it up. Then deleting the data out.
February 28, 2008 at 3:45 pm
Sean
Ah, OK, understood…that makes perfect sense. Two step process instead of all in one, as I was understanding it to be. Thansk Matt.