Overview
You can now trigger a Full Backup directly from your Pipeline as part of your pre-deployment steps.
This feature gives you an extra safety net by taking a complete backup of your production org before making any large or high-impact changes.
Running a full backup before deployment is a best practice - it ensures that, if anything goes wrong, you have a comprehensive snapshot of all your data and metadata ready to restore.
Why run a backup before deployment?
When you’re deploying large changes (like schema updates, record type modifications, or configuration overhauls) there’s always a small risk of unintended consequences.
A Full Backup captures your entire production org, giving you a reliable restore point for all data and metadata, not just a subset of objects. That means you can recover from unexpected issues faster, with complete confidence that nothing is lost.
What do you need to get started?
Before you can run a Backup as part of your pipeline, make sure:
You have an existing Standard Backup job set up for your production org.
You have Execute job permission for that backup job.
If either of these requirements isn’t met, the pre-deployment backup step won’t be available to you.
Example workflow
Open your pipeline and open the release you want to deploy to production.
In Pre-deployment steps, click Back up now.
Gearset will run your backup job.
Once the backup is complete, deploy the release as normal.
Troubleshooting
Issue | Possible cause | Resolution |
Backup run takes longer than expected | This is the first time this backup job has run, or the configuration of the backup job has changed since the last completed run. | Gearset needs to establish a new baseline, the following backup runs will run faster. |
No Full Backup job found | Job not configured for the target org. | |
Insufficient permissions | Missing the Execute job permission. | Ask your backup job owner to update the backup job permissions. |