Refine and Monitor Your Backup

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Identify common backup errors and their solutions.
  
• Monitor backup data using the dashboard, reports, and backup history.
  
• Explain how smart alerts proactively identify and address potential backup issues.
  

Keep Your Backups on Track

Now that Nina Brown has successfully set up a Backup & Recover service for Cloudy College, she needs to establish effective monitoring and management practices. A well-configured backup system requires ongoing attention to ensure it continues protecting your organization's critical data. Let's explore how Nina uses the available tools and features to maintain visibility into her backup operations and address issues proactively.

Backup Status and Common Errors

Backups don't always complete successfully, and understanding common status indicators helps you quickly identify and resolve issues.

Backup Status Indicators

When you review the status of your backup services, you'll encounter several status indicators. A successful backup displays a green checkmark with "Success" status, indicating all data and files were captured without issues. A "Running" status shows that a backup is currently running. Data backups will finish before the file backups: this is by design.

Warning indicators require attention but don't necessarily mean failure. These might appear when certain objects or fields, or an individual record in an object, couldn't be backed up due to permissions or configuration issues. An error status indicates a backup failed to complete, requiring investigation and resolution.

Every week, Nina at Cloudy College reviews the automated email that she receives with a description of her backup coverage and the state of all of her backup services. Occasionally, she reviews this information more frequently–for example, if an org that she administers has had significant deployments or changes.

Common Backup Errors and Solutions

Several common errors can occur during backup operations.

"We experienced permission errors after adding new custom fields to our Course Management application," Nina recalls. "I had to update our Backup Service User's field-level security settings to include the new fields. We also had a 'Completed with Errors' status when our new Financial Aid objects weren't included due to missing permissions, so I learned to investigate those errors immediately to maintain complete coverage."

The Backup Dashboard

The Backup Dashboard provides a comprehensive view of your backup service. The top section of the dashboard displays the content of the most recent backup and provides an at-a-glance view of the status of the backups that occurred during the previous two weeks. You can quickly see which backups completed successfully, which encountered warnings, and which failed.

The dashboard also presents the size of the backup. Understanding how your backup size grows can help you estimate the time required if a recovery is needed.

Nina uses the dashboard to review each relevant object with the dashboard graph and to identify unusual trends and events. During busy registration periods at Cloudy College, she filters to view only student records backups to ensure this critical data receives proper protection.

Backup History

The history section provides detailed information about previously completed and failed backups, both scheduled and user-initiated. You can view high-level performance metrics for each backup and aggregative metrics on the overall backup size for both data and files. User initiated labels and periodical tags (like weekly, monthly, and yearly) are presented here as well.

Use the Backup History to troubleshoot issues and to understand backup patterns. If you notice declining performance or recurring errors, review the backup history to understand the underlying issues.

Nina noticed that ‌the Backup Dashboard and Backup History helped her identify unusual trends in their backups and they informed her about whether changes were necessary. For example, after one backup, NIna noticed that the current backup was significantly smaller than the previous backup, which was a sign of unexpected data loss.

Permissions Report

The Permissions report analyzes your Authenticated User's access rights and identifies potential gaps that could affect backup completeness. This report examines field-level permissions, field-level security settings, and record type access to ensure comprehensive coverage.

The report highlights missing permissions and provides the option to export a permission set file to bulk correct all of the missing permissions, or to exclude the permissionless fields. This proactive approach helps prevent backup warning statuses from happening in the future.

Nina at Cloudy College refers to the Permissions report that is automatically generated after each completed backup, and she reviews the report more closely after making changes to their Salesforce configuration. "This report saved us from missing backups of our new Financial Aid objects because it flagged missing permissions before we discovered the problem during a backup failure."

Backup Exclusions

Backup exclusions enable you to intentionally exclude data from your backups. For example, if you encounter issues with backup performance, you can consider excluding some data from the backup. On the Backup Exclusions tab, you view and manage all the exclusions affecting a backup. This feature helps you verify that your exclusion settings align with your data protection strategy.

Smart Alerts for Proactive Monitoring

Smart Alerts provide automated notifications about data trends in your last completed backup, enabling you to react quickly and to help you resolve issues before they escalate. By establishing predefined rules and thresholds, you can identify and address potential data corruption, unauthorized modifications, or mass deletions before they escalate into significant business disruptions. You can configure Smart Alerts to notify team members through email.

Smart Alert notifications help you monitor data changes like insertions, updates, and deletions across critical objects such as Accounts, Cases, and Contacts, as well as mission-critical custom objects. Smart Alerts extend to metadata changes, providing crucial oversight for alterations to profiles, user permissions, and other essential schema components. This comprehensive coverage ensures that both data integrity and system configuration remain under vigilant surveillance.

While various alert types are available, configuring Smart Alerts for unusual deletion events generally yields the most actionable insights with the lowest incidence of false positives. You tailor these alerts to align with your specific operational priorities and compliance mandates, focusing on high-risk objects or those containing sensitive information. This approach ensures effective anomaly detection and promotes timely intervention, safeguarding organizational data assets.

"Smart Alerts have been incredibly valuable during our semester transitions when data changes rapidly," Nina notes. "We catch and resolve issues within hours instead of discovering problems days later."

Put It All Together

Effective backup management combines proactive monitoring, regular reporting, and automated scheduling to create a robust data protection strategy. Nina has established a routine at Cloudy College that includes daily dashboard reviews, weekly report analysis, and quarterly schedule optimization.

"The key is building backup monitoring into your regular administrative routine," Nina advises other administrators. "With the right configuration and regular attention, Backup & Recover becomes a reliable safeguard that protects our critical educational data without requiring constant intervention."

Backup & Recover tools work together to provide comprehensive visibility and control over your data protection strategy. By using the dashboard, detailed backup information, and Smart Alerts, you can maintain confidence in your backup operations while focusing on other important aspects of Salesforce administration.

Summary

Just like Nina at Cloudy College, you are now ready to be the hero safeguarding your Salesforce data against everything from accidental deletions to integration woes! You're not just backing up data—you're building a fortress around your critical information. Keep monitoring that dashboard and reviewing those reports, and you'll maintain peace of mind knowing your Salesforce data is always protected.