Why not build your own backup solution?

Build vs. Buy Analysis:

• Building your own backup solution has many hidden costs that you should take into consideration

  • Implementing auto-discover to support custom objects and fields

  • Keeping up with new API versions

  • Implementing a notification system that alerts when a backup fails or completes with errors

  • Troubleshooting backup failures and errors

  • Making sure that the backup is efficient in terms of runtime and consumption

  • Maintaining all of this code

  • Maintaining the on-premise storage and backup files

• Opportunity cost: 

  • Focus your energies on your core business, rather than developing a backup and restore tool - that’s why you moved to the cloud to begin with.

• Restore - How would you recover from your backed up data?

  • How will you identify the changes or deletions across your backups? (assuming you have many custom objects and applications, and a lot of data, this could be tricky to do).

  • Will your restore strategy work with parent-child relationships (resulting from cascade-delete)? Given that you can’t set a record’s ID via the Salesforce APIs/tools, and relationships are based on the record ID, this can be very complex.

  • How granular will your restore tool be? would it support bulk updates and inserts? will you be able to easily extract only the corruption that had started and ended last month without overwriting all the unaffected data? would it support metadata?