Creating your first data backup job

Backup your metadata and data records with Gearset

Sravani Bhattiprolu avatar
Written by Sravani Bhattiprolu
Updated over a week 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.

Add a new data backup job

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

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

You can configure the 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.

You set the time of day when the backup is run, and there is an option to run an initial backup job immediately regardless of when the jobs are set to run.

You can also set a retention policy for how long you want to keep the backup records.

There are notification settings that you can configure in the Notification settings tab - for example you can set up a daily email using the Email results to box, or follow this guide to update Slack on the job's status.

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 change or are deleted.

You can choose which objects in your org you wish 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.

At any time, however, you can switch to "Manually Configure", which will give you more flexibility on the choice.


In the Objects to back up tab a warning will be 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 this permission, but be aware that without it 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.

In the Unsupported objects tab we list the objects that will not be included in your backup. An object may be unsupported by the Salesforce API or may be something Gearset has yet to implement support for.

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.

A standard job will, every day, take a backup of the records in your org. High frequency jobs run every hour and are 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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