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Changes to Salesforce Data Recovery Plans

Changes to Salesforce Data Recovery Plans

Starting July 31st, 2020, Salesforce will no longer provide data backup recovery services in the case of data loss. While this is definitely a big deal for Salesforce users, don’t worry, there are plenty of options to ensure you keep your data safe in the event of catastrophe.

data, big data, data recover

Our friends at SalesforceBen have put together a great overview article that explains what the data recovery service is, why you would use it, and what your options are for going forward.

In addition to the comments you can find on that site, at CloudMyBiz, we wanted to add the on that the best practice is to start planning for this change now.

  • Take a look at your processes and figure out what options will best suit your needs
  • Best practices include periodically exporting all of your data for backup, and also doing an export before any major development is deployed.
  • When it comes to choosing a data tool, the Salesforce Data Loader is a great, native option, but we recommend each business do their own research into tools, including 3rd part options, and find the one that best suits their individual needs.

Read the Salesforce Release Notes

 

-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team

 


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App of the Week – PeopleImport – Ultimate Data Loader

App of the Week – PeopleImport – Ultimate Data Loader

PeopleImport

 

Importing leads and contacts into Salesforce can be quite the hassle. Whether you are working in marketing or sales, having a large list imported accurately into the system is absolutely critical. However, if you don’t have the right controls ready to go, you can unfortunately end up causing extra work for yourself by creating duplicates. Even more challenging is what you do with that list after it is imported, and how you connect those leads and contacts to your campaigns, and leave them in an actionable state to follow up on! With all of these considerations, you need to make sure you have a quality data importer to make the process as easy and efficient as possible.

With PeopleImport you can import lists into Salesforce without creating dupes, update existing records, create new ones only when you want, and automatically link Leads and Contacts to Campaigns and assign Tasks.

Check it out here!

 

App of the Week – Jitterbit Data Loader for Salesforce

App of the Week – Jitterbit Data Loader for Salesforce

Jitterbit

Feeling bogged down moving files and data between systems? Is setting up the file transfers complicated, and error-prone? With Jitterbit Data Loader for Salesforce, you can dramatically reduce the time and effort required to automate the import and export of critical business data from Salesforce CRM, force.com and all business-critical databases and files – whether they live in on-premise or in the Cloud. This not only reduces strain on IT but makes life easier for admins as well with “set it and forget it” type automation.

Jitterbit Data Loader for Salesforce is a FREE data migration tool that enables Salesforce users to automate the import/export of data between flat files, databases, and Salesforce / force.com.

Check it out here!

 

Tip of the Week – Solving for Salesforce Data Loader Errors

Tip of the Week – Solving for Salesforce Data Loader Errors

data center, data loader

Using the Salesforce Data Loader is pretty much mandatory when you are working with large numbers of records, and need to perform a mass upload or update. To get optimal results, Salesforce recommends Data Loader usage when you are working with 50,000 to 5 million records.  If less, regular batch tools work perfectly, and if you are working with more, 3rd data apps are the best way to go.

Nonetheless, when running Data Loader, you can schedule these big loads into batches, and let automation process them in the background. There is a catch though: the larger the batch size, the greater the chance of running into issues, like CPU timeouts from lack of memory or query limits in orgs with lots of automation. Basically, errors that are the result of too much data being processed all at once. Considering how essential it can be to use a Data Loader process when working with a large volume of records, how can you avoid hitting these errors and still process your uploads?

One solution is to manually drop the Data loader batch size from the default 200 to 1. Whoa, that’s a big leap, right? By dropping your default batch size you can easily avoid the above errors from large data batches and the resulting lack of bandwidth. However, this solution does have a few drawbacks to consider.

First, there are daily batch limits, and for larger datasets, you may not be able to process all records without reaching that limit. Second, it smaller batch sizes mean your total upload time will take a bit longer. How much longer varies depending on automation and the number of records, but it generally won’t be a crazy large time increase. In the end, if you have a lot of processes running every day, lowering your batch size is a handy trick to help you avoid overloading the system, but still being able to process all of your data. 

Read the: Data Loader Guide from Salesforce

-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team

 

Tip of the Week – Best formatting for importing “Date” and “Date/Time”

Tip of the Week – Best formatting for importing “Date” and “Date/Time”

Technology is pretty great. After all, if you told a person 50 years ago about all the cool things we would have, eg. smartphones and self-driving cars, they would probably not believe you. However, sometimes simple things don’t always work as smoothly as we would like.

When working in Salesforce, users may have trouble importing changes to the “Date” and “Date Time” Data Type fields when the corresponding values in the CSV file do not have a specific formatting or correspond with the org’s time zone settings. I know right? The CSV isn’t formatted exactly right so the whole process breaks down. Sad face.

However, until the smart machines take away all our jobs and do all the work for us, here is the formatting you need to make sure your imports work.

“Date” field acceptable formats

  • YYYY-MM-DD
  • YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss
  • YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss
  • YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssZ
  • YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.sssZ

“Date Time” field acceptable formats

  • YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss
  • YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssZ
  • YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.sssZ

Continued reading on Date Formats and Date Literals

 

-Ryan and the Salesforce Guys