We allow the admin to set limits for API consumption for files and attachment download via the REST API as well as optimize the service run time via Bulk APIs. This article will help explain what they do and how to utilize them.

Before diving into our application, admins should first verify API usage in their Salesforce environment.

1. Log in to Salesforce and enter the Setup Menu.
2. Navigate to the System Overview, Company Information, Storage Usage, and Bulk Data Load pages.

These screens will help you understand the number of APIs your organization uses, your daily limits, as well as your total number of files and attachments. These numbers will be used to decide on your API limit strategy with the application.

To modify the settings in the application, select a service and navigate to the Options menu.

Controlling the Rate of File and Attachments Download

We intelligently separate the download of data objects from the file/attachment objects during a given backup. Since files and attachments only need to be downloaded once (unless changed), the backup service checks for the difference between files and new/changed files in your environment. This includes items such as Attachments, Content Notes, Content Versions, Documents, etc..

The default API consumption for downloading the file/attachment objects is 5,000 API calls, which can be increased up to 600,000 (note: each file consumes 1 REST API call). This means that with a 600,000 limit, every backup will attempt to use up to 600,000 API calls to download 600,000 potential records. This will continue for each backup, until it finishes downloading all of the file/attachment objects.

For example: If an org contains ~1,400,000 files to download and the API limit is 600,000 - it will take approximately three backups for all the files to download. Warnings for file download limits will be displayed until all of the file/attachment objects are fully downloaded.

Optimizing the Data Backup via Bulk API

This option allows you to enable and optimize the number of API calls made when loading large data sets up to the permitted Bulk API limits by Salesforce. Leveraging Bulk API can increase backup throughput, thus reducing the backup run times.

For more information on managing limits of Bulk API and Bulk API 2.0, see API Optimization Using Bulk API and Bulk API 2.0

We recommend using the default limit of 1,000 bulk batches and increase, only as needed, by 200 batch size increments. 

You may review the Bulk API Batches usage in your Backup History tab within the Service.

If you have previously optimized your services with our application:

• Checking this feature will override the previous settings with new dynamic settings
• Unchecking the feature will restore the customized optimizations that were made

If you are unsure on how to best set these options, reach out to our Support via email or the Customer Portal.

Keywords: Bulk, API, Limits, Limit