Data and metadata are essential to backup. While there are a number of tools out there that can assist with data backups and recovery, the lowest cost, easiest to establish and maintain system is all handled by Salesforce tools. “Data Export” (Part 1) and “Sandboxes” (Part 2), both of which take less than 5 minutes per week to complete.

Data Export (data)

Ideally backups would happen weekly which is Data Exports highest frequency. The scheduler will receive an email when the backup is complete, they should then save the file to a shared location.

Sandboxes (metadata)

Sandboxes could be created daily, but they would quickly run out and is generally excessive especially if the CRM team has a release cadence. If a weekly sandbox creation is done to capture the metadata in the system, Enterprise edition customers can easily store 3 months of weekly backups. The naming convention I use is “meta231130” meta + YY + MM + DD, this keeps the sandboxes in chronological order. I recommend a backup prior to a change set deployment.