Tomorrow might be April Fool’s Day, but what if I told you that your Salesforce backup plan isn’t as foolproof as you think? As a Salesforce Admin, protecting CRM data isn’t just part of the job, it’s a necessity – when was the last time you actually questioned your backup strategy? Don’t be a fool this World Backup Day by assuming you’re 100% covered.
The unfortunate truth is that you’ve probably heard and believed too many Salesforce backup myths, whether it’s about Salesforce support restoring 100% of missing data or that manual exports are good enough. Spoiler: These are myths, and they could cost you.
World Backup Day 2025 is here, and we’re here to help you debunk these misconceptions. Because it’s no longer about just backup and recovery, it’s also the key to accurate AI and smarter responses from Agentforce. Let’s examine the truth behind these top 5 Salesforce backup myths and help you build a better data protection strategy.
Why Backups Matter for Salesforce Admins
As a Salesforce Admin, you know how important data is throughout your organization. From opportunity records to cases to automation flows, your business runs on data. But what do you do when a data loss event happens? Unfortunately, data loss isn’t a rare occurrence anymore – it’s just a matter of time.
Accidental deletions, mass updates gone astray, integration errors, or bad actors could cause critical data loss and bring your operations to a halt. It’s an impact that can be felt across the organization – financial, regulatory, or even reputational.
To mitigate these risks, it’s critical to make sure that you have a comprehensive backup strategy in place; don’t assume you’re covered by Salesforce or another third party. As AI-driven automation (e.g. Agentforce) becomes more dependent on clean, historical context, having an intact, accessible backup isn’t just about recovery – it’s about maintaining trust in your insights and decisions.
Before you assume your Salesforce data is safely protected, let’s break down the biggest myths that could leave you vulnerable.
Common Salesforce Backup Myths
Myth 1: Salesforce Automatically Backs Up Your Data
It’s a common misconception that SaaS applications like Salesforce back up your data when you purchase a license. Unfortunately, that’s just not the case. With a shared responsibility model, Salesforce is responsible for the application but not the data itself, which falls on you.
Truth
Salesforce does offer some various backup and recovery options but is limited in capability. There are native features such as Weekly Export, Data Recovery Service, and Recycle Bin, but the gaps make them unreliable as a complete backup solution:
- Weekly Export: Takes weekly snapshots only as you could lose seven days of data.
- Recycle Bin: Stores deleted records for only 15–30 days and has storage limits. Once full, older records are permanently erased.
- Data Recovery Service: This is offered as a last resort and is costly and not always effective.
If data loss has occurred, you may not be able to fully recover fast enough or even recover everything that you need to prevent disruptions in your business.
Bottom line: You’re responsible for backing up your data, not Salesforce.
Myth 2: If Data Is Lost, Salesforce Support Can Restore It 100%
Many assume that if a data loss event occurs, Salesforce Support can step up quickly and restore what’s missing fully. Trusting this service wholeheartedly could be a costly mistake. While Salesforce provides powerful tools for managing customer data, full data recovery just isn’t one of them.
Truth
Salesforce had discontinued its Data Recovery Service in 2020 and then reinstated it again. But even when the service is available, it takes quite some time and is expensive. More importantly, this paid add-on service doesn’t guarantee full data restoration either. Limitations of the Data Recovery Service include:
- Lengthy Process: This process can take weeks, meaning you will be without that data set for an extended period of time.
- Expensive: With a hefty $10K price tag, this service should absolutely be treated as a last resort.
- Incomplete Restore: Salesforce cannot guarantee that all your data will be recovered in its entirety.
If you cannot afford weeks of downtime or potential data gaps, this Salesforce Data Recovery Service is not for you.
Bottom line: This service should not be your backup plan as you do not have a good recovery strategy in place.
Myth 3: Manual Data Exports or Sandbox Copies Are a Reliable Backup Strategy
Some organizations believe that manual data exports or full sandbox copies are enough to protect against data loss events since they provide a snapshot of your data, which you could recover from. In truth, it’s not thorough enough to cover you sufficiently.
Truth
Although exports and sandbox copies capture some of your data, they do not – and should not – serve as your primary backup solution. Shortcomings of relying on these processes include:
- Manual Exports: Each export serves as a singular snapshot in time that will be missing any changes in data in between exports. You will also be missing metadata, relationships, and automations that make correctly restoring data challenging. This process is also reliant on Salesforce Admins remembering to do this task on a rolling basis, adding human-error into the equation.
- Sandbox Copies: Copying data to your sandbox environment is meant to be for testing and development purposes, not for data recovery. These copies can be outdated if any changes occurred in the production environment and were not pushed to the sandbox environment. This also makes data restoration to a certain point-in-time difficult.
Your backup is only as strong as its data restoration capabilities. If you skipped a manual export or forgot to complete a more recent sandbox copy, you could be out of luck on the data recovery front.
Bottom line: Manual processes should not be your primary backup solution. If you can’t restore your data when you need it, your backup strategy just isn’t working.
Myth 4: You Own Your Salesforce Data
It’s easy to assume that when you back up your data, it’s yours. But do you truly own your data when it’s stored in a third party’s infrastructure? Or are they just holding your data hostage and locking you in?
When it comes to backups, not all vendors give you full control over your data.
Truth
It’s your Salesforce data, but to take full control and ownership of it, you need to bring that dataset under your security umbrella. The pitfalls of not owning your data are:
- Vendor Lock-in with Third-Party Backup Solutions: If your data is stored in the backup vendor’s infrastructure, you don’t actually control it 100%, and you are locked in with that vendor
- Single Vendor Risk with Salesforce Backup Tools: If Salesforce runs your application and your backups, you could experience a great deal of heartache whenever there is downtime. Not to mention, you would be locked in on all fronts if you ever wanted to consider other options.
Don’t get locked into a backup provider’s infrastructure. Instead, choose a Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) approach so you can own, control, and have full access to your data backups in the cloud of your choosing.
Bottom line: If you can’t store your data in your own infrastructure, you don’t actually own your backups or the data stored within them.
Myth 5: Backup Data Has No Impact on AI or Agentforce
With AI-powered automation like Agentforce transforming the way businesses operate, many believe that real-time data is the only valuable data.
However, AI and automation still rely heavily on clean historical data to maintain accuracy.
Truth
Agentforce and other AI tools need to use all available, clean data to generate accurate insights. If it’s only using real-time data or data is missing or corrupt, AI can make decisions based on incorrect or limited information. This is where your backup data comes in:
- Historical Context is Necessary for Accurate Responses: If historical datasets are missing, AI recommendations may be skewed, inaccurate, or misleading.
- Backups are Your AI Data Safety Net: Agentforce can update records in Salesforce, meaning an error or bad input could overwrite critical information. Without a backup, there’s no way to roll back the mistakes.
AI and Agentforce are only as good as what you feed it. If it lacks historical context, you could be making the wrong decision, and without a reliable backup, you may not be able to roll back overwrites made by Agentforce.
Bottom line: Garbage in, garbage out is real. If AI is not fed well, you can’t rely on its answers.
Best Practices for Foolproof Salesforce Backup
Now that we’ve covered the top five myths around Salesforce backups, it’s crucial to understand what’s actually required for a robust and reliable backup and recovery strategy.
Let’s dive into how to ensure your backup strategy is designed for practical recovery.
Automated Backups Are the Bare Minimum
Although manual exports and sandbox copies can provide a glimpse of your data, they are not dependable in the event of a Salesforce Disaster Recovery situation. With the risks of human error and potential data loss, implementing an automated backup solution that runs continuously in real-time is your best bet to protect your data and your organization’s future.
This automated process guarantees that your data remains consistently protected, accessible, and available for restoration when needed. Manual methods are filled with shortcomings, and automatically backing up your data should be table stakes in 2025.
Backup the Whole Customer 360°
Salesforce contains so much more than just records you see in the interface – it’s a 360° customer information ecosystem that also contains custom fields, automation rules and workflows, permissions, relationships, and metadata.
Data backup is just one part of the equation, and not taking metadata into account means that you are overlooking a critical part of what’s essential to protecting the full Customer 360.
A comprehensive backup strategy must encompass both record data and metadata protection to ensure that you can fully restore your org properly, not just in part.
Bring Your Own Cloud for Backup Storage (BYOC)
Not every backup provider allows you to maintain control over your backups. Many keep your data in their vendor-owned cloud, which can hold your data hostage and leave you at their mercy (especially when it comes to price hikes).
To take back full ownership and control over your Salesforce data, adopt a Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) strategy. This enables you to store backups within your own cloud ecosystem, ensuring data independence and complete access to your history under your security umbrella.
Test Your Recovery Plan
You’ll know if you have a good backup strategy when you need to restore. However, you should not wait until a data loss event to find out just how good your backup truly is. Scheduling regular recovery testing can ensure that:
- Backups include all expected data and metadata.
- You can restore back to a specific point in time.
- Recovery is efficient and meets your Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
Preserve Historical Data for AI and Compliance Needs
Several regulations mandate long-term data retention policies, making historical data preservation imperative to meeting compliance. On the other hand, clean, comprehensive, historical data is necessary in making better predictions with AI and Agentforce.
If they are not fed clean, comprehensive data, these AI recommendations could be incomplete or, worse, misleading. Ensuring that your backup solution retains necessary historical data to satisfy both AI and regulatory needs is crucial for your organization’s success.
Monitor for Anomalies and Patterns
Data loss may not happen abruptly; it can also build over time due to poorly managed integrations, human error, or unauthorized changes.
To have a comprehensive backup strategy, your solution needs to be able to identify anomalies – unusual changes in your data – allowing you to take action before the situation escalates.
Final Thoughts
The reality is that data loss is inevitable, and you need to be prepared when it happens, regardless if it’s accidental deletions, integration malfunctions, or bad actors. Best practices for business continuity begin at backup, and you need to ensure that your organization is always prepared.
Take today – World Backup Day – as the perfect reminder to rethink your data strategy. Especially with the emergence of Agentforce and AI, it’s time to consider modern backup solutions that are built as more than just an insurance policy but, in fact, an enabler to better insights.
At GRAX, we believe that if you control your data, you control your destiny. Check out our demo to see how we can help you take back ownership of your data and get you on the fast track to insights.
