Introducing data backup and recovery

Backing up your data should be a critical part of your business continuity plan. In the Salesforce ecosystems, many organizations don't have consistent backup processes and tools implemented. The thinking usually goes that Salesforce is backing up my data, so I don't have to. This is a myth because Salesforce doesn't provide data backup and recovery services. I believe some people confuse Salesforce's near real-time data replication with providing backup services. Real-time replication is Salesforce's way of ensuring high availability for customers, and for maintenance and compliance purposes due to hardware failures or power outages.

When you log in to Salesforce, your instance is actively served from a location referred to as the active site. At the same time, any transactions that are happening are replicated to another instance in real time, but at a completely different physical location. This instance is referred...