Description
Watch our Gearset accelerator session where we talk about best practice and game changing features in Gearset.
In this video we walkthrough:
- Automate data backups. Schedule daily backup jobs or back up instantly with one click for complete protection of your metadata and data, whatever your org size.
- Restore data successfully. Safely back up and restore Salesforce data and metadata while preserving any parent-child relationships.
- Ensure data compliance. Set retention policies and delete individual records for compliance with data protection laws.
Gearset Accelerator videos:
Transcript
Welcome to the seventh episode in the Gear Set accelerator series. As a quick introduction, I'm Ruth, and I'm here with Charlie today. We're part of your customer success team, and we're responsible for making sure you folks can make the most of your Gear Set license and to support you improve your DevOps sales your Salesforce DevOps process. We're also joined by Anthony and Sam, who, some of you might recognize from the in app chat.
Sam and Anthony are two of our customer support engineers, and they're joining us today to help answer some questions that you folks may have.
So today, we're gonna be talking about data backup and restore in Gearset.
We're gonna be exploring as well as, how as well as safeguarding against worst case scenarios, Gearset's backup solution also increases the efficiency and agility of your development process. So if all goes to plan, then by the end of today's webinar, you're gonna learn how to automate and schedule daily backup jobs and backup instantly on demand for complete protection.
We're gonna show you how you can safely backup and restore Salesforce data and metadata while preserving any parent child relationships.
And, we're also gonna show you how you can set retention policies and delete individual records to help you stay on top of any compliance that you've got. As for questions, there's no real formal process, so just pop them into the chat, and we'll try our best to answer you either on the fly, or after the demo. And for any questions that we can't address today, we'll be sure to follow-up with you all individually to make sure you get the answers.
And with that, that's enough for me. So let me hand over to Charlie.
Hi.
I'm Charlie, and I'm also part of your customer success team here at Gearset. As Maruf said, we'll be covering today how to kind of safely back up and restore Salesforce data and metadata, set retention policies, and kind of delete records for compliance reasons, amongst other things.
Saying that, I've got a quick PowerPoint that I'm gonna share my screen with now, and that will be what we're running through, at the start of the webinar.
Can you all see that okay?
Okay. I've I've got a yes from Ruth. Fantastic.
So what is a backup solution? And it's a hint. It's not just the backup solution. There's a few more things to think about.
First thing you need to think about is getting data out of Salesforce.
So data and metadata are equally important, as I'm sure you all know. Metadata controls your permissions, your access to your orgs, and things like that. And you can't, restore data unless the metadata is correct. So you need to have your metadata all in line before you can move your data into that metadata.
Second point is you need to understand your orgs data model.
You need to understand and consider what you need to back up. Identifying those key objects, that are important to not lose is really a key part of, your whole backup process. And then the third thing is, you need to think about prior data incidents. Things like Salesforce outages, accidental deletions, and human error are all things that could potentially happen or might have happened to you in the past.
Secondly, you need to be comfortable with your solution and monitoring your backup. So monitoring backup plays a crucial role in responding to incidents as quickly as possible. What I mean by getting comfortable with your solution is Gearset's a very powerful tool when it comes to backup and restoration. However, you need to get comfortable with what you're doing.
So when the time comes, you know what you're doing, and you're not kind of running around panicked, trying to figure out what what's going on. The second point is understanding what normal looks like. When we go onto the gear set backup screen, there'll be plenty of changes. And understand and understanding what normal looks like will help you kind of figure out if something's gone wrong or untoward, And then in turn, being able to action a fix quicker, is better than if it was left to brew for a few days.
The third point is get notified quickly when unexpected things happen. So Gearset helps with this as you can set us up to notify you when a particular action happens, which I will show you. But figuring out what would be abnormal so that you'd like to be note notified by it, will help you for if the time did come.
The third part is restoring the actual data. So, ultimately, backup solutions are only as good as their ability to restore data to Salesforce.
The first point of this is you need to consider potential scenarios as I briefly mentioned before. If you've seen certain data loss scenario in the past, then this is a good place to start when preparing how you'd respond to it. But, also, if you haven't, spending some time thinking about this and how you would respond depending on a data loss scenario is a really valuable use of your time.
The second point is plan your restore process before you need to do it for real. By doing this when the comes time comes and you potentially have a data loss incident, this will mean you're not panicking. As I mentioned before, instead you're kinda calm and know what you're going to do and how you're going to do it. This could be the difference between a smooth restoration and a bit of a hectic one.
The third point you can see here is test your restore process for real. This is much as the same as the point before, but by testing it, it kinda alleviates the pressure if something was actually to go wrong.
We often see customers setting up a practice run on a partial copy sandbox, delete a small amount of records that they might not need, then use gear set to restore them, back to how they were. It's all kind of down to you how you'd like to do this, and down dependent on your situation. But anything, that is like testing is a really good thing to do.
The final slide on this is to test your restore process. So there's two kind of points two ways of measuring, disruption.
So recovery point objective, RPO, relates to the time between your latest backup and the incident that caused data loss.
To be as effective as possible, you want this to be as short a time as possible, which is where our high frequency jobs come in, which happen every hour. I'll talk about this a bit later. And then the second point is recovery time objectives. So this relates to the length of time taken to restore data after the data loss incident.
You also want to make this as short as possible and as easy as possible, and this is where gearset can come in really handy as it makes this recovery process a lot easier than it would be. And so this ties nicely into what I'm about to show you with our different restoration options.
Saying that, let's get into the actual demo. If I can do it.
Can we all see that okay? As we said at the start, any questions you may have, just put them in the chat, and we should be good to go.
So what you're gonna see here are my two backup jobs. I have the daily backup and then the high frequency backup here. If you haven't already created a backup, you're going to create it here and press this button. But for the purpose of this demo, I'm just gonna show you mine that I've already created, and this will look much the same as how it will look for you.
So I'll press edit job here, and I'm gonna press edit settings.
So the first thing that comes up on this wizard is the job name. I've called it Charlie prod backup. The second is which, org you're going to be backing up, and the third is the daily API call usage limit. So this is the percentage limit of your API allowance that this backup will use up as a maximum.
This limit is rarely reached at eighty percent, but you can pick and choose how much of the API will use to back up these objects. It's entirely dependent on you really. And then the final bit is retention policy. So if you've got a retention policy, that means you have to delete data that's older than, say, seven years.
As my example shows here, then this is where you will set that retention policy.
You can also see here that you can turn it into years, months, days, or weeks depending on what your retention policy is.
The second tab is notifications.
So you have the option to send notifications on every run or only if the data backup run fails. It's dependent on what you want once again. But once these you want to choose which option, you can get the results emailed to one of your emails, obviously, text results, and we also have Slack and Microsoft Teams, integrations as well.
The third tab here is what I alluded to earlier about getting notified, and getting used to, what normal looks like. So say here that I want to be notified when one hundred records in the account object are removed. That's clearly quite a big thing that's, quite a big event that's happened, so I wanna find out about it. As that is quite an extreme example, but you can go through all the, different objects, ones that are important to you, and decide what you want to set an alert for.
The fourth tab is filtering. So currently, I have our our recommended filters, our our recommended objects set in place, but you can pick and choose whichever objects you do want back backed up.
You can go to the not recommended objects, which are quite often objects which take up a lot of space, which aren't necessarily needed in the backup. You don't always need them backed up. But if you do really wanna include them, then you can do that easily here.
You can also search by the object name there. And also finally, up here at the top, you can for future backup runs, you can automatically include, new recommended objects that you may have created in your org and also any managed packages that you that you have, added as well.
The final tab is permissions here. As you can see here, I've got Beth who I can delegate certain permissions to.
It depends, what level of access you'd like to give members of your team, and it really depends on what's important to you and your business. If you'd like to bring in other stakeholders, for example, potentially your legal team who need to look at the audit history for compliance reasons, you simply give them the option to view here like that.
And it really sort of depends on your your needs, really, and it is up to you.
So I'll go down here.
What you can see here, I'll go back to the edit job his edit job settings. So here is the remove records from backup job. As Maruv mentioned, we're gonna speak about compliance a little bit here. So this is where you, are able to have complete data con control over your data in your org. For whatever reason, if you need to remove, a record for compliance reasons, this is how you do it. You can do up to ten thousand record IDs. Hopefully, you won't have to do that, but it is there as an option if you need to, just by separating them by with a comma.
You'll put in a deletion reason. Try and make this as clear as possible for whoever's gonna be reading it. And then finally, we have delete data here as well.
You'll have to type out delete data. This is kind of making it as foolproof as possible so you won't delete, records by accident, because I know that is easily done.
The third part here is delete job and backup history, and then the final part is transfer ownership. So say someone's, going on holiday or something like that and you wanna transfer the ownership of the team, of the backup, that is how you would do it there.
As I mentioned at the start, here are the high frequency jobs. This is available with the Teams license, but not the starter license, unfortunately.
But what it does is, you will filter, maximum of ten recommended object ten objects max.
And these are objects which will be backed up every hour. So you need to make sure that these are your most ten most important objects that if they were deleted, you would want that RPO to be as small as possible so that the differences in the data are limited.
That is everything on the setup and the edit job history.
I'm now going to head into the job history here.
So what you can see here is, an overall mine looks a bit scary because we've got a script that runs, so there's lots of changes and deletes deletions. Hopefully, yours won't look like that, but you never know.
So what you can see here is, all the different runs, what time they started, what time they ended. You can give them a friendly name and also their status there. I canceled this one.
Some reason, I can't remember. But there we are. That is completed there.
You can also see the data differences. So you've got new types of data, changed data, and deleted data as well.
I'm gonna leave this page for now because as I said at the start, the metadata is just as important as the data in this scenario. So I'm going to head over to metadata history tab.
What you can see here is a metadata snapshot where the metadata is different. So I'm going to head into view changes there.
So as I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with, this is a comparison screen. You have, new, changed, and deleted.
You also have the option to filter and all these options to filter by here as well. So when I roll back this metadata comparison, what it's gonna do I'm not gonna do it now. But what it's gonna do, the source is going to be this snapshot of the backup that you wanna roll back to, and the target is going to be your live org.
So as I said, this is really key in that this whole process that you get that metadata aligned because without doing that, you're gonna have nowhere to put the data.
I will then go back to the job history here.
So now that we're done with the metadata, I'm going to head into view changes of the actual data backup run.
As you can see, this is, a list of objects that were in this backup run. So for example, I'm gonna choose this account. You have new, changed, and deleted. It's worth bearing in mind, you can't restore new records because that would be a deletion, and we don't support deletions. That's not something that we wanna do.
So you'll be able to restore the changed and deleted ones.
I'll head into the view records here and, yeah, wait for it to load.
This is also quite similar to the comparison screen. There's various different options that I have. So if I select a few, record IDs here, I can go into the record history of each record ID. So you can see that this record ID has changed a lot.
You can go through each backup run and see when it was changed, and you can also see when it was deleted to say it was deleted.
So this is quite a powerful tool if you wanna look back and go through the history of each record and figure out what's actually happened to it.
Another thing is you can, also add field filters here in the top right hand side. So say that I know that the record was, created, more than three years ago, say, I'll be able to filter by that. And if I wanna get really granular with it, I can keep adding filters as well, adding field filters, and then this will let me decide, and see the records that I'm really interested in.
I'll get rid of that for now.
You can also download these records.
That's an option there. But what I'm gonna talk about now is the, restoration process and how that works.
So if I go here, as you can see, you have four different options for your restoration process. The first one in the top left hand side is restore records with dependent objects.
So this is gonna restore records for a single object and their associated child records.
So this is where Gear Set comes in and really helps you out. You can select a singular record ID, and then we'll analyze your your org and your, the data relationships, and we'll then pull in all the, child, relationships of that record. So as you can see, I selected this account.
These are the child relationships that you have, all the contacts, and all the opportunities that come along with it as well.
At the bottom here, you can say if a deployment step encounters an error, you can stop deploying remaining records, or at the same time, you can choose to continue deploying remaining records. This is really up to you depending on what you want to do.
I'm going to go back here now.
Oh, won't do that one. I'll do this one. And I'll restore from the previous backup as well.
So this section is if there are particular fields which has changed, which you know you want to restore back to how it was in the previous backup. So I'll press this here. You'll head into this page, where you will be able to select that particular field.
That will then restore that field to how it was on all the record IDs that I previously selected. So I only selected one, but I'm able to, select a few in that previous page, and then I'll filter, I'll be able to restore that field on all of them.
You can also see all the different fields that was, that were changed in from the last backup. So say the phone number was changed. You can also tick these, and they'll be restored back to how they were.
You can also refine it and apply different fields to filter this by, say and also add another value. Say you know which record ID you want to revert. You can plug that in there, and that will be done for you.
I'm just going to head back to this page now.
The third option is restore records without dependencies.
So this is quite simple restoration.
It's very similar to the first one I showed. But in this case, gear set doesn't pull through any of the child relationships and the dependent records alongside the one, selected. A use case for this would be if you knew a very particular record that had been deleted and you understood your data model to the point where you didn't need the dependencies, that would be your option.
This final is this final option, I'm not gonna show you today. It's for more complex restorations.
This works very similarly to our sandbox seeding. You can watch the webinar on that on the link on our website.
To do this, you need very good understanding of your data model, which I mentioned earlier as complex restorations mean you will need, to know how all the relationships between your objects work.
So those are your four, restoration options. If you have any questions on those, just let us know in the chat, and, Anthony and Sam will be happy to answer them.
I will now go back to this page here. So as you can see, there's a few more tabs that I need to go through.
This object analysis, this is where you can see object by object, each backup run and what's changed, and each snapshot of the backup run if it's new, changed, or deleted on a certain object, for example, account.
That's just to kinda give you a bit of a more granular overview on that object rather than having to look at the whole backup run.
The second tab is the audit history. So if I go to a custom range and apply it there, you'll see that this Salesforce record ID, I deleted for GDPR reasons, compliance reasons. You can see the user, the date that it was requested, and the record status as well. So this was removed. You can also export all audit history records, say for your legal team if they wanna see it. You'll be able to download the CSV file and send it to them and show that you have been good and you have been auditing your records.
The penultimate tab is the data download history.
So say, if I was to download the backup run, this is where it would show. You'd see the, friendly name, who it was exported by, when the export started, and the status of the export as well. You'd then be able to download this as a zip file.
The final thing that I'm gonna show you is pretty powerful. You can if you know a certain record ID that you're looking for, you can then search the backups for that specific record ID. And what you will see there is all the history of that certain record. So you can see I added it here on Saturday, the tenth of August. Wasn't changed. Wasn't changed. And then it was deleted on Tuesday, August thirteenth.
You can then go into each particular, backup run, and that will show you the whole the snapshot as a whole.
So that's it for all the tabs.
I hope that was useful, and I hope that you, understood everything that I was talking about. I'll hand you back to Maroof now, and, if you have any questions, they'll be good to go. Thank you for listening.
Charlie, thank you so much. Thank you for walking us through all of this today. Hope this folks this gives the folks some more confidence in terms of using their own, backup tool. We have had a few questions pop through. So we've got we've got a few minutes left, so perhaps we can start answering, some of the questions we've had come in.
Charlie, while you've got your screen open, this might be a good one for you to, expand on. Of course.
Customers ask us, are there any objects that cannot be backed up?
Okay. Yeah. Good question.
So if I head back to this screen here and I press edit job and go to filtering, So here, you'll find can't find the object you're looking for. So if I press on this, there could be a reason why the object, you're looking for isn't supported. There's various reasons. So it may not be supported by the bulk API, or we may just not, we may just not support it currently.
You can search for the object name here. There's a variety of reasons, but if you can't find the objects you're looking for, that is the place to go.
Wonderful. Thank you very much, Charlie.
Another question that we've had pop up is, how many people would you recommend having access to the backup?
Anthony, can I hand this one to you?
Yes. You can definitely hand this off to me. So, generally, we typically give an answer on this based on the size of your team. So point of example, you know, some teams may only have one person that manages the backup and whatnot.
But if you're in a team of, you know, two or more, we generally recommend that you have, you know, at least a few people on that backup just because, you know, in the case that that one person is out or not available or just in general, just wanting to have another set of eyes on it is great, especially if, for example, you go to reach out to one of one of us in the support chat. We're able to kinda, again, have more of an ability to help you if you also have access to the backup in that point of view. But that would be our general recommendation. Does unless anyone else disagrees with that?
I think that's great advice, Anthony. Yeah. Thank you.
We've got time for one more question.
So, Sam, how often someone else how often should I practice a restore?
So I suppose as often as possible, really. You need to be prepared for, like, worst case scenario. So, obviously, gear set can make it much easier for you to do a restoration if you ever need to. But, ultimately, if you do a restoration process and follow that as often as possible so you're familiar with it, it's like Charlie said earlier, being comfortable with the process.
And when you do need it, if you ever do, then you're gonna be able to to do that easily.
That helps? Abs absolutely, Sam. Yeah. Great advice there.
Right. So that that kinda brings me to the end of all the questions, that we've had so far today. So I can start to wrap up today.
But firstly, thank you, thank you to the three of you for joining and, showing us through this lovely demo, Charlie. And to the folks watching from home, thank you very much for joining us today. I hope today's session's been useful. I hope what Charlie's talked about and the advice here from the boys will give you folks, you know, the confidence to make the most out of your backup licenses.
Now if you'd like to watch this, again in the future, or share with the team any team members who haven't been able to make it today, don't worry. This recording will be available very shortly. You can find it as part of our, you know, through Gear Set resources in the help center with resources under onboarding, where you'll also find a huge catalog of, a variety of resources that will help you folks make the most out of your, of your Gear Set license. But other than that, and as always, please do not ever hesitate to contact us, your customer success team through success at Gear Set dot com.
And, today, you've got to meet some of the folks that are on the other end of the, in app chat who are also there to help you for your, I guess, your fastest route to technical support. And with that, I'll, bring today to a close, but thank you all for joining, and, I hope you all enjoy the rest of your day.
