Legacy Backups

FEATURE RETIREMENT ALERT - EOL Dec 31, 2022

One or more features described here is part of a retirement. Please see the official GRAX Feature Retirement page for more information on this and other feature retirements.

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Historically, GRAX placed much of the responsibility for creating, managing, and monitoring a healthy backup schedule on the users. This meant configuring jobs manually with unique schedules, settings, and object selections while needing to avoid the pitfalls of the Salesforce API, Apex Jobs, Scheduling Constraints, etc. This complication created many shortcomings in real-world usage of the backup features. GRAX has since moved to Auto Backup which simplifies the entire backup process into a single button click to protect your entire Salesforce dataset. For more information, see the documentation above or contact GRAX Support.

Creating Backup Jobs

Backup jobs can be created from the "Schedule" tab in the GRAX Managed Package. To create a job, select the dropdown in the top right and choose "Backup." This opens the configuration screen for a new job.

Managing Backup Jobs

Existing backup jobs can be managed/edited from the "Schedule" tab in the GRAX Managed Package. To view an existing job configuration, click on the name of the job. To edit an existing job configuration, click "edit" in the bottom right of a job configuration popup or "edit" on the actions dropdown in the backups table.

Backup Types

Currently, the two options are Standard Backup and Files (there is also an option for Tags or History if your org has enabled these). The selection determines which object list is displayed.

• Standard Backup shows you all the objects you are used to seeing in SF, except "File" objects.
• The Files option shows you only 3 specific objects. Given the special considerations around Files, you need to back these up as part of a separate process going forward.
• The History option shows you all activated and existing history tables.
• The Tag option shows you all enabled tag objects.

Once you select one of the backup types, the object list begins loading.

Filter Criteria

The filter options, as explained above, may vary depending on the toggle selections. The default filter criteria allows you to filter based on a starting Audit Date Field. GRAX picks up all records starting from this date field onward.

GRAX uses one of the following Salesforce system fields (in order, given that some objects may not have all these fields) to filter the selected objects:

SystemModstamp
LastModifiedDate
CreatedDate

If you had selected the Single Object Backup toggle, you'll have more flexibility in selecting specific date fields on the object that you want to use for filtering.

Default option of selecting a single "Audit Date Field" to filter records starting from this entered date onward.

More date fields are available to filter on (along with a start date and end date) if you enable the "Single Object Backup" toggle.

View SOQL Query Filter

Oftentimes a more advanced Salesforce administrator may want to run a SOQL query in their own tool of choice against the filter criteria that they have selected, in order to get a better sense of how many records are picked up, for example. You may notice a "database" icon next to the date filter field. Click the icon to open a pop-up that shows the SOQL query format of the filters that you entered. This can be very beneficial to Salesforce users who are more familiar with SOQL and want to do a quick copy/paste.

Scheduling

Select your Schedule for how frequently you would like this process to run. For example, this process runs for the first time on November 3, 2018 at 12:00 AM and would continue to run daily at 12:00 AM.

Option Flags

Incremental Backups

When this feature is enabled the Scheduled Process backs up only records that have changed (based on SystemModstamp) since the last time this Scheduled Process ran successfully. We recommend all large backups use this incremental option, so that subsequent runs only grab changed records and save on API calls, increase performance etc.

Incremental Backup cannot be enabled if you are using Date Range Selection as it doesn't necessarily make sense to incrementally back up records when you set the criteria with Start and End Date.

Email Notifications

Enable this toggle to receive an email notification to the specified users upon successful completion. Note that you always receive a notification if the process did not complete successfully.

Once you enable this toggle, you'll see a Notify Additional Users section below that allows you to search for users to receive the email alert, as well as specify up to an additional 250 comma-separated email addresses.

Rolling Date

The benefit of the rolling date option (versus a more simple "Last N Days" filter), is that it allows customer to set a custom schedule and still only back up a rolling period of records. For example, let's say you wanted to schedule a back up on the fifteenth of each month, but only pick up records modified the previous month. Specifically:

• Initial run of the process is scheduled for June 15, for records with a modified date between May 1 and May 31
• The next run of the process (on schedule) is kicked off on July 15, and with the rolling date option, it is set to grab records with a modified date between June 1 and June 30.

Statuses

Let's take a look at some of the statuses you'll see on the Schedule tab when looking at your backups.

Running - this status indicates that the process is currently running. You see this status for the majority of the job's lifecycle.

Aborting - Status when a user manually aborts the process.

Aborted - Status once all abort activities have finished. This may take a few minutes.

Completed - All records have been successfully backed and sent to GRAX.

Completed - Errors Backing Up Data - This status indicates that there may be some issues with the backup. You can find out more information and see specific error messages by navigating to the related GDRs or error report link.

Error - Not all batches were process successfully. Use the error report link in the action dropdown to see more information.

Formula Fields

Backup of formula fields is disabled by default, as you see with the new toggle (once you enable the Use Bulk API toggle). GRAX recommends you don't enable the backup of formula fields for a couple reasons:

• Formula fields can be problematic because they are immediately stale once you back them up. The record in Salesforce could easily have a new value in the formula field (and this isn't possible to capture given Salesforce doesn't update the record audit fields when formula field changes), or someone could easily change the logic of the formula within Salesforce rendering all the data you backed up stale.
• Salesforce also has restrictions on querying formula fields, and the more formula fields you have on an object, the more Salesforce requires GRAX to “break up” (fragment) the queries, which leads to a much longer time to back up.

Taking these factors into account, GRAX doesn't recommend enabling the Formula Field Backup toggle. Please speak with your Support or Implementation rep to discuss further if you have questions on specific use cases.

GRAX recommends that you don't enable the Formula Field Backup toggle to optimize performance, API usage, and data lake integrity.

Backup Actions

You can create, edit, delete, and deactivate a Backup all from the Schedule tab's actions dropdown on each row.