What You Need to Know About Salesforce’s Recycle Bin

In order to protect users from accidentally losing data, Salesforce has provided the Recycle Bin. If any important data disappears, administrators and certain users have the option of restoring that data from the Recycle Bin.

In order to protect users from accidentally losing data, Salesforce has provided the Recycle Bin. If any important data disappears, administrators and certain users have the option of restoring that data from the Recycle Bin. While this seems like a quick fix for the problem, it’s important to note that there are some limitations with this process:

• Deleted data is only available for 15 days. After 15 days, data is permanently deleted from the Recycle Bin, and if it hasn’t been backed up any other way, your only recourse is the Salesforce Data Recovery Service, which means it could take weeks to get your data back and cost a minimum of $10,000 USD.
• Restoring deleted data is not available to all users. Administrators and users with the “Modify All Data” permission are the only ones who can restore lost data from the Recycle Bin; all other users would have to contact them for assistance. This will result in lost productivity and create an additional burden to Salesforce administrators.
• Doesn’t retain all versions of the data. If a user accidentally changed a record before deleting it, they’ll only be able to recover the latest version with the incorrect information, not any previous correct or point-in-time versions which may be what the user actually wishes to restore.
• Metadata is lost. Any customizations, reports, dashboards, etc. cannot be restored and must be manually recreated. This can be painful and costly to rebuild these bits of information. In addition, if other processes or teams are dependent upon these customizations, more than just the user who lost data can be affected.

In short, the Recycle Bin offers protection from data loss that is extremely limited and should not be considered an adequate SaaS data protection strategy. In Gartner’s report “Do You Need to Cover Your SaaS to Prevent Data Loss?”, they advise:

“For customers who want to have additional backup/recovery functionalities, they may find it worthwhile to evaluate and adopt a third-party backup tool that offers more automation and simpler procedures than the native backup/restore functions.”

If you’re looking for a better way to make sure your data is always easily recoverable for all your Salesforce users, check out Spanning Backup for Salesforce and get started today.

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