What do you all recommend as a not super costly SF backup tool that can also export metadata and can deal with a couple million records? (We probably have 300,000 contact records and then 1 million+ campaign member records).
We have been using Spanning Backup for many years and it's been working fine, but I discovered a significant bug/flaw in it at the beginning of the year and I can’t get their support to acknowledge the bug, let alone fix it. They don’t seem to understand what I’m trying to explain to them because all their responses refer to things that aren’t the actual problem I’m having! So, I'm looking for another tool for when our contract is up that hopefully won't have the same issue.
The issue we’re having with them is that I noticed when I export Campaign Members from the backup that there are multiple records listed as IsDeleted False that have the same contact id and the same campaign id. Obviously, anyone who knows anything about Salesforce knows that you can’t have more than one campaign member record for the same contact and campaign.
Sure enough, when I look up the actual campaign member ids in Salesforce, the duplicates in the backup file have been deleted and don't actually exist in Salesforce (sometimes they've been deleted for multiple years, so it isn't just like a day or week lag time). Obviously, this is a large problem in a backup file because if we lose access to the actual data, I won’t know which is the right, existing campaign member to re-import it! It does seem to be that the most recently updated campaign member record is the live one, but I’d prefer not to rely on that and instead have a backup platform that doesn’t have issues with campaign members.
Some campaign member records do show as deleted in Spanning when exporting (IsDeleted True), so I think this bug only occurs in certain special cases. So, far I’ve been able to replicate it by merging two contacts that both had campaign members in the same campaign (where both were already in a Spanning backup before being merged). And I suspect there might be a cause when we use the add to campaign button from a report (and overwrite people if they already exist in the campaign). But, those are standard Salesforce features, so they should be supported in a Salesforce backup tool! At this point we have over 100,000 extra campaign member records exported in our backup that don't really exist in Salesforce.
So, if anyone knows of any backup tools that do work with campaign members and merging contacts, etc. please let me know!
And secondly, if you use Spanning backup, you might consider exporting your Campaign Member records and seeing if you have duplicates too. If so, please open a case! Maybe if they get enough complaints, they’ll finally realize it’s an issue and fix it.
@Katherine West Thank you so much for your detailed response. We just started a trial with them and your response gives me pause. I'll definitely checkout Avepoint as well!
