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Creating your first data backup job

Backup your metadata and data records with Gearset

Sravani Bhattiprolu avatar
Written by Sravani Bhattiprolu
Updated over 2 months ago

Creating a backup job is a team owner feature. If you are a team owner you will see this:

If you are not a team owner, you will need to ask your team owner to allow you to become a team owner to create a job.


Considerations for using team-shared org connections for Backup

It is possible to use a team-shared Salesforce org connection for your Backup jobs.


How is this useful?

Consider a scenario where your Gearset team aims to connect the backed up org from a Salesforce "service user" account - usually a type of account that is managed and accessed by multiple members at your organisation.

This way, a backup job created in Gearset can be set up from a generic account that isn't necessarily tied to a single Salesforce user (e.g. a Salesforce user that is assigned to a specific person at your organisation).

What potential issues does it solve?

This can help with avoiding issues such as having to recover access to a Backup job originally set up by a user who may have left the organisation, and prior to leaving didn't transfer the ownership of their backup job to another member on their Gearset team (because a Backup job was created for an org authorised in Gearset via that employee's Salesforce username).

Note: If a Backup job is created from a user-owned Salesforce org connection, then backup job creator is the sole owner of such Backup job.

However, if a Backup job is created for a team-shared org connection added to Gearset, then every Team Owner on a Gearset team becomes the owner of that job.

Add a new data backup job

You can add a new org to back up via the CREATE BACKUP JOB button.

Next, you give your backup job a custom name and select the Salesforce org you want to create a backup job for.

Which orgs can I back up?

You can only back up orgs that you own the connections for and not those that have been delegated to you.


Daily API usage limit (%) in the context of a backup job

When adding a new backup job, you can configure the daily API usage limit (%), after which Gearset will stop trying to back up your data records to allow non-backup jobs to use your API call.

Note: There is no specific API usage limit assigned by Gearset to a backup job. However, your daily API limit depends on the Salesforce Edition you are on. Salesforce allocates a daily API limit for each org across all platforms.

Salesforce documentation will provide you with more information on ​API Request Limits and Allocations.

When you hover over the sign next to the setting where you define your daily API call usage, you'll see a pop up with useful information from Gearset:

"Salesforce allocates a daily API limit for each org across all platforms. When the limit is reached, it will prevent any communication with your org through Salesforce API until the limit is reset. If you set the limit to 80%, it will guarantee there will always be at least 20% of your daily API consumption free to use for non-backup jobs."

Define the time when job is run and the retention policy

Next, you set the time of the day when the backup job is run.

There is an option to run an initial backup job immediately after saving your new job, and regardless of the Time your job is set to run.

For this to happen, make sure to tick this option: Run first backup after saving job.

You can also set a retention policy. This defines the length of time want to keep the backup records.

Backup notifications

Notification tab allows you to configure notification settings for your backup job.

Email notifications

You can set up an email notification using the Email results to box. This notification can be sent either:
- on every (backup) run, or
- only if the data backup run fails

Once configured, choose the email address(es) or telephone number(s) to which you want the notifications to be sent.

Slack notifications

If you'd like to update your Slack on the job's status, you can follow the configuration guidance from this article:

Smart alerts

The Smart alerts tab allows you to trigger notifications based on more advanced rules.

For example, if you want to get alerted when more than 5% of your contacts in Account object change, and/or when 100 records in Account are deleted, you can set up respective alerts and add them in this section.

Editing existing alters

Currently, it isn't possible to edit already created/added alerts. You'd need to create a new alert and delete the one you wished to amend.

Filtering tab

You can choose which objects in your org you want to backup or exclude from the job in the Filtering tab.


If you're looking for a starting point, you can use our Recommended objects filter. Gearset will suggest the objects to include, avoiding loads of unnecessary objects and therefore improving the job's performance.


In this section, you're expected to see below message in our app (as on the screenshot):

"To help your backup job run quickly and use fewer API calls, Gearset recommends backing up only the objects containing business-critical data. By default, each backup run will contain your organisation's metadata, plus the data for:
- Salesforce standard objects
- Your custom objects
Managed packages (including configuration for CPQ, Vlocity, Conga etc.)"

'Manually configure' filtering setting

At any time, however, you can switch to Manually Configure setting, which will give you more flexibility on the choice of what's being backed up in your job.

The dropdown option next to Show setting allows you to filter by
- Recommended objects
- Not recommended objects
- Selected objects (the ones you've selected for your backup), or
- Unselected objects (the ones you've not selected for backup)

'Modify All Data' and 'Query All Files' profile permissions

In the same tab (as on the above screenshot) you may also see a warning message displayed if your Salesforce profile doesn't have the Modify All Data or Query All Files permission enabled.

You can still back up your organization without these permissions. However, be aware that without having those permissions assigned to your profile, there may be objects in your organization that you are not able to include in a backup and/or restore.


You can also choose to enable automated backup for any new objects and managed packages.

Unsupported objects

Your backup job settings have a section where we list the unsupported objects, so the objects that will not be included in your backup.

An object may be unsupported by the Salesforce API or it may be something Gearset has yet to implement support for.

To see the list of such objects, while still being on the same page (as on screenshot above), click on Can't find the object you're looking for? option.

This will open a page with additional information on the objects that are currently unsupported.

When Gearset knows the exact reason of why a specific object isn't supported, it'll display it in the Reason column. An example (highlighted in blue on below screenshot) is an AcctMgrTargetMeasure object, which - as per the info we provide - is Not supported by the Bulk API.

These unsupported objects won't appear in the list of objects you can include in your backup job.

You can click on: sign to navigate to the previous page.

Providing access to team members

The Permissions tab allows you to assign seven types of permissions to individual members of your team.

These permissions are: View, Browse, Execute, Edit, Delete, Restore and Download.

View - users with this permission can see the job on their dashboard, displaying its status, last run and next run info. They will not be able to browse the data in the job.

Browse - users with this permission can view, browse, and search the data contents of each job.
Note: Assigning Browse permission to a team member automatically gives them a View permission (required in order to browse through the job).


Execute - users with this permission can run, reschedule, disable, and enable jobs.
Note: Assigning Execute permission to a team member automatically gives them a View permission (required in order to execute actions on a job).

Edit - users with this permission can update job settings, notifications, smart alerts, and object filters.
Note: Assigning Edit permission to a team member automatically gives them View permission (required in order to edit a job).

Delete - users with this permission can delete records from the job as well as the entire job and its history.
Note: Assigning this permission to a team member automatically gives them View and Browse permissions (required in order to edit a job).

Restore - users with this permission can restore records from runs of the job to the org.
Note: Assigning this permission to a team member automatically gives them View and Browse permissions (required in order to execute a restoration).

Download - users with this permission can download metadata and data from runs of the job.
Note: Assigning this permission to a team member automatically gives them View and Browse permissions (required in order to download data/metadata).

Below is an example of how all the above access level permissions for your Backup job could be distributed among different team members:

Types of data backup jobs

Once you have successfully created your first job (which is a standard job by default), and if your have a Backup Teams License assigned, you will now see an option to choose between a Standard Job and a High Frequency Job for your next backup job.

How often do standard and high frequency jobs run?

Standard job - runs every day. It takes a backup of the records in your org once a day.

High frequency job - runs every hour. This job is limited to 10 objects.

To create a high frequency job, you can follow the same steps except for not having to set a time for the backup to run and the limit of 10 objects for the filter.

Number of data backup jobs

By default, each Gearset team can have up to 2 standard backup jobs. If you need more, please chat to us about your use case. If you have a Backup Team License, you will also have 2 additional high frequency jobs.

Data backup dashboard

On this dashboard you have an overview of the data backup jobs that you have set up. Only your account has the visibility of the jobs you set up. Each job represents a single org that is being backed up.

Reviewing a data backup job

Once the job is set up, if you did not select the option to run the job after creation, it will show a pending status. Once it hits the scheduled run time, it will begin the first snapshot.

When the job is running, you'll see the status change to blue. The time that the run takes will vary depending on your org record size.

When the run is completed, it will change to green. You can view the history and statistics of the job by clicking View details. Jobs can also be run on demand by clicking Back up now.

If there are any issues running the job, you'll see more information about what went wrong.

Data history 

The job’s history page will tell you the details of each run, along with a visual representation of the changes to your records over time.

Clicking Use snapshot... will give you the following options:

  • Download data - For more information see this article

  • Replicate snapshot allows you to replicate this run's data or metadata to a different org (or repository in the case of metadata).

View changes lets you drill down into the changes across each object for this run. There, you will have two options:

  • View records allows you to see a list of all the records changed for an individual objects, with the option to perform a quick record restore or configure a restore if you wish.

  • Restore allows you to restore deleted records. For more information about this see this article.

Clicking on a job run row will expand it and show two more options:

  • Restore snapshot metadata lets you restore this orgs metadata to this org. For more information about this see this article.

  • Restore snapshot data lets you restore this orgs data to this org.

The last column refers to the metadata differences and will show as either Identical or Different. Clicking one of these will redirect you to the Metadata history tab.

Metadata history

In this tab you, will find all the runs for the metadata backup. The options available here are very similar to the ones in a Monitoring job: Download org snapshot, download comparison report, explore permissions, view code analysis issues, view changes, deploy changes to another org or a repository and perform a roll back.

Object analysis

Switching to the Object analysis  tab will show the record changes by object for the chosen timeframe.

Selecting an object at the top will display how the records in that object have changed during each backup job run. To view more details on a specific run, click the run time link.

Audit history

If you delete a record from a data backup job, this is where you will find the details with the option to export as a CSV file as well.

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