Backup and recovery – tools of the trade

In this section, we will discuss some tools that are widely used for backing up and restoring data. As you will see, some of these are native and free from Salesforce, while others are third-party AppExchange applications. These are just a handful of tools and the list is not exhaustive by any means, nor is it an endorsement of any one tool. We have already discussed factors that may influence your decision-making, including costs, and those should be used as a guide to determine the most optimal tool for your organization. Note that I didn't say best or cheapest, but rather optimal, which means balancing the needs of your organization with practical constraints such as costs, the nature and size of your business, and data volumes.

Let's start with the native tools from Salesforce.

Data Export Service

This is a UI-based tool within Setup that allows you to either schedule or manually run backups of your data. It allows...