Data protection
Salesforce backup and restore options for midsize companies
Salesforce backup and restore options compared: what is included free, what paid tools add, and a restore test to run before you need one.
An admin runs a Data Loader update on a Friday afternoon, and the wrong column lands in the Account Owner field. By Monday, reps in Iowa City and Lawrence are calling on accounts that are no longer theirs, and nobody can say what the old values were. Or an ERP integration quietly overwrites prices on open quotes for a week before anyone notices. These are the moments when a backup plan stops being theoretical.
Salesforce backup and restore options fall into three groups: the tools included with your licenses, Salesforce’s own paid Backup & Recover add on, and third party backup products. The included tools can save copies of your data, but they do little to put it back. A paid tool is what gives you daily backups of data and metadata with selective restores, and whether you need one depends on how much a bad week of data would cost you.
What Salesforce includes at no extra cost
The Recycle Bin. Deleted records stay there for 15 days, and users can restore them during that time, according to Salesforce’s help documentation. Salesforce Support can extend the window to 30 days on request, and those are the only two settings. The Recycle Bin only helps with deletes. It does nothing for records that were changed to the wrong values, which is often the harder problem.
The Data Export service. Setup lets you export your data to CSV files on a schedule. Weekly exports are available in Enterprise, Performance and Unlimited Editions; Professional and Developer Editions can export once every 29 days. The export instructions note that the zip files are deleted 48 hours after the email is sent, not counting weekends, and that formula and roll-up summary fields are always left out. Records in the Recycle Bin are not included either. If nobody downloads and stores the files, the export protects nothing.
Data Loader. An admin can export any object on demand. Before any mass update or import, export the fields you are about to change, so you can load the old values back if something goes wrong.
Sandboxes for your setup. Your configuration (fields, flows, page layouts, permissions) is metadata, and the data exports above do not cover it. A Developer sandbox holds a copy of production metadata as of its last refresh, according to Salesforce’s help documentation. That is useful, but it is a single snapshot, not a history you can roll back to.
Paid Salesforce backup and restore options
Salesforce now sells its own tools. Salesforce Backup & Recover, formerly Own Recover, offers daily and on-demand backups of data and metadata, comparisons between backups, and restores of selected records. Continuous Data Protection is a separate add-on. Salesforce’s product FAQ says pricing varies with each customer’s needs, so expect a quote.
There is also a native product inside Salesforce called Backup & Recover Next. Its help page says it takes a full backup when you turn it on, then a daily incremental backup of records added, changed and deleted, with a full backup every Sunday. You can restore records along with their deleted child records. It runs in Lightning Experience on Professional, Enterprise, Performance and Unlimited Editions and needs the Backup & Recover Data and Backup & Recover Files add-on licenses.
Third-party products fall into three kinds: vendors that specialise in Salesforce backup, general backup vendors that cover Salesforce alongside other business systems, and Salesforce release management tools that include backup. Their pricing models differ, per user, per org or by storage, so compare the total yearly cost for your data volume rather than the headline rate.
| Option | What it protects | How restore works | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recycle Bin | Deleted records, 15 days (30 on request) | Undelete in a few clicks | Included |
| Data Export service | Data you select, weekly or every 29 days | Manual reload from CSV files | Included |
| Data Loader exports | Whatever you export, when you remember | Manual reload | Included |
| Sandbox | Setup, as of the last refresh | Manual redeploy | Included, within your sandbox allowance |
| Salesforce Backup & Recover | Data and metadata, daily | Selective restore from a backup | Paid add-on, quoted |
| Third-party backup | Varies by product | Varies by product | Paid, priced per user, org or storage |
Restore is the hard part
Backing up is easy to buy. Restoring is where companies get surprised. Salesforce records are linked: a contact belongs to an account, an opportunity has products and quotes, a case has emails and files. Put records back from a CSV and they come back with new record IDs, so every link to them has to be rebuilt in the right order, parents first.
Your own automation also gets in the way. Flows, validation rules and integrations fire on restored records just as they do on new ones, so a restore can send welcome emails, reassign owners or push records to your ERP again. Someone has to decide what to switch off during a restore and turn it back on afterwards.
That is why the most useful thing you can do this quarter needs no new purchase: run a restore test. Pick one account with its contacts, opportunities and files. In a Partial Copy or Full sandbox, or a Developer sandbox where you have loaded that account, export it, delete it, and restore it with the tools you have. Time it, and note what broke. If the answer is a day of an admin’s time for one account, you know what a real incident would look like. Do the test again whenever you change backup tools.
How to choose for a company of 10 to 500 people
Start with two questions. How long could the business run on wrong or missing data, and who would do the restore? A distributor in Minneapolis running quotes and orders through Salesforce can tolerate far less downtime than a firm that uses Salesforce mainly as a contact list.
The included tools may be enough when your org is small, data changes slowly, integrations are few, and someone reliably downloads the weekly export and has practised a reload. Add a habit of exporting before every mass change, and you have a modest but real plan.
A paid tool earns its cost when integrations write to Salesforce every day, several people run imports, quoting or service history lives only in Salesforce, or you have retention or audit duties for regulated data. It also helps when your admin is part time or new. If yours just left, our guide on what to do when your Salesforce admin quits covers the handover.
We work with midsize companies, roughly 10 to 500 people, across Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Colorado and the wider Midwest, from our office in Omaha. Many run lean, with one admin and several integrations, which is where a backup plan is easy to put off. If you want an outside view, our fixed scope, fixed price diagnostic takes two to three weeks and ends with a costed roadmap and risk register you own.
Common questions
Does Salesforce back up my data for me?
Salesforce runs the platform, but recovering from a bad import, a mass update or an integration error inside your org is your job. Salesforce offers the Data Export service and sells Backup & Recover for this.
How long does the Salesforce Recycle Bin keep deleted records?
Fifteen days by default. Salesforce Support can raise it to 30 days on request. It does not help with records that were changed rather than deleted.
Can I restore Salesforce data from a Data Export file?
Yes, with Data Loader or a similar tool, but you have to reload objects in order and rebuild the links between records yourself. Test it once before you rely on it.