Baby Got Backup: best practices to prevent data loss
Data drives your organization, and it goes without saying that losing data can be devastating. Anybody that’s ever had to rewrite a paper, say goodbye to misplaced family photos, or tell a client that you can’t find their payment knows the heartache and pain that goes along with data loss. It doesn’t have to be that way! Mistakes will always be made and crashes can happen, but data loss should be a thing of the past.
Make a Backup Strategy!
It’s one thing to regularly backup your data, it’s another thing entirely to create a strategy to restore your data in the event of an emergency. Many organizations regularly backup their data, but very few have a documented plan (If you don’t backup your data at all, now is the time to look into it!) The difference between a couple hours of server downtime and days of restoring data is easily translatable into lost revenue.
To put it in perspective, in 2011 IT downtime cost businesses $26.5 Billion in North America and Europe alone, while in 2007 Amazon lost $3.48 million in the span of a few hours. Major corporations can weather these types of storms much easier than a small business or nonprofit. That’s why it’s especially essential for you to plan, develop, and implement a strategy to restore information in the event of a breach or failure.
For Salesforce users, recognize that while you’re using a cloud-based service that has near real-time backup and storage, it’s incumbent upon you to keep a local backup of your data. Check out this guide for a step-by-step process on how to backup your Salesforce data to .CSV files.
Automate it!
The best way to ensure your data is being backed up is to create an automated system for its backup and restoration. It’s consistent, accurate, fast, and lets you focus on the sundry other things on your to-do list. Once an automated backup is set up, it runs in the background so you can forget about it and put that valuable mental energy on other important matters.
You can schedule your Salesforce data to be backed up as frequently as once a week at no additional cost. But just because it’s automated though doesn’t mean it can be totally ignored. Somebody will need to be in charge of downloading and saving the export data file. Whoever schedules the backup will receive the notification that the backup is complete and will have 48 hours to download that backed up data. If you rely on Salesforce to recover your data, be aware that there is typically an added cost and timeframes can vary.
Other options include third-party solutions that automate the backup process. Backblaze offers unlimited backup storage on a per computer basis. For Salesforce integrated backups, check out the app store.
No matter what approach you take, the bottom line is without a backup strategy and a dedicated resource to make sure your data is safe, your organization is vulnerable to serious downtime. You can roll the dice, but gambling with your company’s future is probably not the best bet.
Learn more about how to keep your system running smoothly
