EBOOK
TALES OF THE UNKNOWN
THE LOST SALESFORCE
DATA MYSTERIES
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Tale of the Torn Safety Net
The Tale of the Fat Finger Fiasco
The Tale of the Multiple Changes
The Tale of the Neglected Backup
The Tale of Uncontrolled Sandboxes
It was a dark and stormy night. Your Salesforce data is snuggled in the cloud, safe
from the raging cyber tempest. Or so you think. The cloud can be an ominous
place. Unbeknownst to you, events are unfolding all around you that could shatter
your security and cause your data to evaporate. What can you do to prevent it?
Only the shadow knows.
Many have suffered from mysterious Salesforce data loss. They, too, thought they
were safe but suddenly, and without warning, their data disappeared. No one knew
how or why. There may be hope for you, however. Pay heed to the tales we are
about to unfold and learn how to avoid a similar fate.
2 | The Lost Salesforce Data Mysteries
THE TALE OF THE TORN SAFETY NET
Adam Admin was working on one of his key reports and noticed a file was missing.
“That’s odd,” he thought. “It was there just last week. What could possibly have
happened to it?”
He began reviewing the things he had done during the previous five days. On
Tuesday, he had been doing some cleanup and had deleted some older files. He
must have inadvertently deleted the one for which he was looking. “No worries,”
he thought. “I’ll just resurrect it from the recycle bin.”
But when he checked the bin, the file wasn’t there. Something sinister was afoot.
His first reaction was that someone had surreptitiously gained access to his
account and deleted the file. He looked furtively over his shoulder at his coworkers, some of whom he was sure were beginning to look guilty.
“Who stole my file?” he lashed out at his bewildered cube mates who just stared
at him. “Sure, I deleted it but it was only a few days ago. It should still be in the
recycle bin!”
He needed to get to the bottom of it. He called Isaac the IT guru. “What happened
to my file, Columbo?” he screamed into the phone, addressing Isaac by his more
familiar nickname. “Where has it gone?”
“Put in a help desk ticket and I’ll get right on it,” Columbo said unconvincingly.
A few hours later, Adam’s phone rang. It was Columbo. “File’s gone, Adam. Sorry.”
“How can that be?” Adam said frantically. “Aren’t deleted files supposed to stay in
the recycle bin?”
“Yes, but there is a size limit to the bin,” Columbo replied. “Once it reaches the
limit, it starts dumping the oldest files. Those files are gone for good.”
“But this was only two days ago, how could it be filled already?” Adam cried.
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“Well, it looks like your pal Sam Salesguy took care of that.” Columbo replied. “He
deleted a ton of files yesterday, filling up the bin completely. Anything that was put
in before that is long gone.”
Adam was inconsolable. It would take him days to reconstruct that file.
“Why me?” Adam cried. “Why me?”
“It didn’t have to happen,” Columbo said. “There is a way this entire situation could
have been avoided.”
“How?” Adam asked.
”If the file was that important, you
should have backed it up with a third
party software,” Columbo added
smiling.
“If Sam had used the API bulk delete processing utility, he would have been able
to dump his files and bypass the recycle bin,” Columbo explained. “That would
have kept the safety net in place for short-term recovery. Unfortunately, that didn’t
happen. So you see, your data loss was no mystery at all. It was just a simple case
of mistaken deletion.”
“And if the file was that important, you probably should have backed it up with third
party software,” Columbo added smiling.
Adam just shook his head as he turned to his computer and began rebuilding his file.
4 | The Lost Salesforce Data Mysteries
THE TALE OF THE FAT FINGER FIASCO
Harry Helper, a Salesforce administrator, was distraught. He had just updated ten
thousand new leads into the system…or so he thought. When he went in to check,
however, everything was gone! What had happened to this data? Something was
rotten in Denmark. This was a job for Columbo, the IT detective.
“Let’s retrace your steps,” Columbo started patiently. The admin sighed heavily. “I
entered all the new leads like I always do,” Harry began, “and when I was finished,
I hit the update button.”
“Hmm,” said Columbo. “Are you sure?”
“Yea, it’s right here on the keyboard next to the delete button,” Harry said. His
words trailed off at the end of his explaination. His face went white as he realized
what he had done.
“Oh no,” Harry cried. “I must have hit the delete key instead. Everything’s gone!”
“No problem,” Columbo replied. “You can use the backup we ran three days ago.”
“That won’t help. I’ve only been working on it for the past two days. Nothing will be
in that older backup. Do you know how long that’s going to take?” Harry moaned.
“I’ll be here for hours recreating that database.”
“Well, there’s nothing else you can do now,” Columbo said. “But there is a simple
way you could have avoided this.”
“Yea, how’s that?” Harry said forlornly.
“With a third party backup solution, you could have forced a backup right before
you hit the update, or, in the unfortunate case that you accidentally hit the delete
button. You would have been able to roll the clock back to minutes before your
error. Then you could have done the update again…this time hitting the right key,”
Columbo said with a chuckle.
“Ugh,” Harry sighed. “Now you tell me!”
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THE TALE OF THE MULTIPLE CHANGES
Columbo stood in the middle of the conference room with arms folded shifting his
gaze from Sam Salesguy to Mary Marketer. “We have a corrupted database and I
need to get to the bottom of what happened,” he said.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Mary said. “I made some important account status
updates for some of our customers. Once I was done, the Salesforce team pushed
those changes into production.”
“Don’t look at me,” said Sam. “I just told the Salesforce team that some of my files
were messed up and asked if they could restore them. They said they would do it
right away.”
“Aha!” said Columbo. “There we have it. The change they made fixed Mark’s
problem but overwrote everything Mary did.”
“That’s crazy,” said Sam. “What could have prevented that?”
“If the Salesforce team had tested those changes by refreshing the sandbox first,
they would have had the opportunity to catch the two changes going on at once,”
Columbo explained. “Going forward, changes should really be made in the refreshed
sandbox before they are pushed to production. If that had happened in this instance,
once the changes were checked in sandbox, it would have been obvious that Mary’s
changes had been overridden. They then could have gone back and revised the
restore to accommodate both sets of changes and push to production with the
revised restore.” Columbo patted Sam on the back and sighed heavily.
Mary looked confused.“Do we have that feature on our third party backup
software?” she asked.
“Yes,” Columbo replied. “Backupify for Salesforce is there to protect and restore to
both product and sandbox environments. So, you see, it was no mystery at all, just
a case of not using an important feature that can ensure the integrity of our data.”
6 | The Lost Salesforce Data Mysteries
THE TALE OF THE NEGLECTED BACKUP
“What do you mean? I lost everything?” screamed Adam Admin staring at his
desktop helplessly. “I thought we backed everything up?” The tired admin looked
defeated.
“We do every weekend,” replied Columbo. “Today is Friday, which means anything
done to the data since Monday is gone.”
Adam was incredulous. It had not been a good week for him. He had already had
to recreate a key report that took a couple of days and now he was being told that
a network meltdown blew away all of his company’s critical Salesforce data.
“By the way, the weekly export backup doesn’t capture code, metadata, custom
configurations, or the sandbox development environments,” Columbo added. “We
can get you the week old data, but after that, you’re kind of starting from scratch.”
Adam wanted to cry. This was a disaster.
Columbo sighed. “It doesn’t help us now, but there is a way we can prevent this in
the future,” he said.
Adam looked up from his computer screen. “How’s that?” he asked in a voice
barely above a whisper.
“A third party backup solution, such as Backupify, would solve all of this in
minutes,” explained Columbo. “Performing manual backups can take four to six
hours a week to download. Depending on how big the database, it can sometimes
take days. It doesn’t do deltas or show how much data is changed so with growing
environments a manual back up process goes from being an annoyance to being
completely impossible. With a third party solution, the process is totally automated
and can be done daily. It captures virtually everything developers have done, not
just the base data.”
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Adam looked hopeful. Columbo continued his explanation.“You can use native
Salesforce functionality for a weekly export so you get a clear copy of your main
objects,” Columbo continued. “But you’re going to need storage for that.
These files are huge, especially if you’re downloading the entire file or multiple
tables. With a third party, all the backup storage is taken care of for you. You don’t
have to worry that you need 10 or 20 or 100 gigs of storage for the weekly exports.
You just go in and specify what you want to recover and you pull it out and you’re
done. You only have to store what you’re currently working on and dump the rest.”
Adam stood up. “This type of solution sounds like my new best friend,” he said.
Columbo went on.“It really is. With a solution like Backupify, you’ll never have to
worry about maintaining the files or monitoring the process. No one has to watch
what’s coming in or delete the older files or keep a baseline from a year ago. You
don’t have to worry about anything related to data storage. The most current
version is there when you need it.”
”The bottom line with a third party
backup solution, like Backupify,
is that you have a secure, reliable
backup you can always count on.”
“This could change everything for me,” said Adam.
“Absolutely. With a third party cloud-to-cloud backup solution, your admin duties
are simplified and less worrisome. You won’t have to worry about anything related
to data storage. The most current version is just there when you need it. In
certain cases, it’s object by object,” Columbo said, “so it’s really straightforward.
Opportunities, leads, contacts, and accounts are easily retrieved. The bottom
line with a third party backup solution, like Backupify, is that you have a secure,
reliable backup you can always count on.”
“Well we better get that in place for next time,” Adam muttered. “I don’t need any
more suspense.”
8 | The Lost Salesforce Data Mysteries
THE TALE OF UNCONTROLLED SANDBOXES
“Columbo, something is terribly wrong.” Sam Salesguy was frantic. “I’m supposed
to be getting some new leads from our marketing automation feed, but they’re not
here. They’ve disappeared!”
Here we go again, thought the IT guru. Columbo began his investigation with the
developer group.
“Sure, I wrote the lead flow from MA to get those to sales on Tuesday,” said Danny
Dev. “Those were assigned to the east coast sales team. Sam should already be
seeing those in Salesforce.”
“And I made a few changes to that flow on Wednesday,” chimed in Carl Code,
sitting in the cubicle next to Danny. “There shouldn’t have been any problems.”
Columbo shook his head. “Well there is,” he said. “Sam isn’t seeing them.
Luckily, thanks to Backupify, our third party backup software, we can go back and
download the metadata backups for both Tuesday and Wednesday to check out
what the two of you did.”
Columbo compared the two sets of backed up code Danny and Carl created and
quickly found the problem. Carl had fat fingered something while making the
changes and the leads had been sent to the UK instead of the US. Being able to
get down to the granular metadata level allowed him to uncover the issue. From
there, the code was easily fixed and Sam could access to the leads.
“It’s great we were able to access the backups and resolve the problem, but it
could have been prevented altogether with a better process in place,” Columbo
told the developers. “Multiple admins and developers working in multiple
sandboxes on different projects is bound to cause errors.”
“The best way to control that is to have times and plans for each developer,”
he continued. “Developers have to be held accountable for what they’re doing.
You have to know what sandbox environment each one is in and you need to be
9 | datto.com
able to control which sandbox can send information to production. Make sure
the connection to production is not established until the very end. Lock out the
ability to push anything to production unless it is tested and approved by a senior
gatekeeper. And never let anyone work in the live production instance. Always
work in the sandbox.”
“Do that and you’ll never have to worry about your data disappearing,” Columbo
summed up.
Taking the suspense out of your Salesforce data is no mystery. As secure as the
cloud may be, there is always the danger of data loss. The secret is to back up and
establish easy access to your data. The best way to do that is with a third party
backup solution, such as industry-leading Backupify for Salesforce. With that kind
of protection, you’ll be able to easily unravel your data disappearance whodunit.
Case closed.
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10 | The Lost Salesforce Data Mysteries