How to Restore Metadata in Salesforce Without Using Force.com IDE

Every Salesforce administrator and developer needs a better way to restore Salesforce metadata – that’s why Spanning Backup for Salesforce now provides automated Metadata Restore for 17 metadata types: Dashboards, Reports, Email, Layouts, Objects, Permission Sets, Profiles, Roles, Triggers, Workflows, Classes, Pages, Flows, Flow Definitions, Approval Processes, Report Type and Assignment Rules. Why does this new feature matter? It’s incredibly easy to accidentally delete a Custom Field during a busy day full of distractions – one click in error, and a look away, and not only will the field be gone – all the data it contained will be deleted as well.

In discussion with various User Groups, we’ve heard those issues may be hard to spot until well after the 15-day window to undelete has passed.

Salesforce Metadata Restore with Spanning

Spanning Metadata Restore now makes restoring metadata easy from start to finish — without using any other tools. The many use cases for restoring Salesforce metadata include:

• If end users or admins modify or delete a report or dashboard in error.
• If a deployment’s gone wrong – which can happen within a single org, or between Sandboxes and/or Production orgs – and you need to quickly revert to the last known good set of metadata while troubleshooting.  
• Before starting a restore process for records, to ensure that the restore can complete successfully.
• When admins or developers are trying to build sandboxes for development/testing between refresh cycles, restoring metadata between two different instances is very useful.

We’ve also heard from organizations using multiple Salesforce development teams that being able to back up and then restore metadata is a vital part of change management, in case one team overwrites another’s work in error.

With our new metadata restore functionality, your teams will no longer need to manually restore metadata components using Force.com IDE, which can free up hours of time. And this new feature is a win for those teams with limited access to Salesforce developer resources – you won’t need to be technically skilled in using the complex IDE environment for metadata restore, nor will you need to know how to package metadata files to push them back into the same org or a different org.

How else does Spanning make metadata restore easier?

You can restore components from multiple Metadata Types in a single restore back into the same Salesforce org or to a different Salesforce org – even if Spanning is not installed in the target org.

With this new feature, we protect and cover the entire Metadata change management lifecycle with daily automated backups, exports, comparisons, and restores. Listening to Salesforce admin and developer needs, and creating solutions that are easy from start to finish — that’s what makes Spanning a must-have solution for leading enterprises, and for more than 8800 customers around the globe.

For more details, read our Knowledge Base article.