Imagine this nightmare scenario. It’s late Friday afternoon when you get an urgent message from the team: your company’s data has been corrupted by a rogue Apex class. It’s scramble time! You need to use your backups to restore your Salesforce accounts - and you need them restored by the start of play on Monday. But the team member responsible for setting up and managing your backups is on a week-long vacation. Everyone’s counting on you.
There’s no need to worry - Gearset’s got your back! Flexible team management and permissions are baked into all of Gearset’s features, including your backup and restore tools. So here’s how to avoid that Friday afternoon nightmare.
Grant restore permissions to a team member
Data privacy regulations and your company policies set out how you need to handle sensitive and critical data. Your team’s permission settings should reflect these compliance and security requirements.
Permissions within Gearset are based on team owner and team member roles. When you create a new backup job in Gearset, you can use the Permissions tab to assign ‘View’, ‘Browse’, ‘Execute’, ‘Edit’, ‘Delete’ and ‘Restore’ permissions to individual members of your team.
By default, the creator of the backup job is granted all permissions, and all team owners have the ‘View’ permission. Assign the ‘Restore’ permission to a member of your team to give you the peace of mind that someone else can run a restore, for example, while you’re on vacation.
To grant the ‘Restore’ permission, just select the team member from the dropdown and tick the relevant box. This will automatically add the ‘View’ and ‘Browse’ permissions as well. Then hit Save to enable the permissions for that team member.
If you want to remove permissions from a team member in future, just use the delete icon or untick the permissions you would like to remove, then click Save.
By default, we don’t add any team members to your backup jobs because we want to make sure that nobody can view backup data unless you’ve explicitly granted them permission to do so.
Edit the permissions on an existing backup job
If you’ve already got a backup job running and you’d like to give another team member the permission to restore data and metadata from backups, you can edit the settings on an existing backup job. In the data backup dashboard, select the relevant backup job and click the cog icon. From Edit settings, you can change the permissions in the Permissions tab as above.
Restoring from backups
Generally, if you’re restoring lots of data, it’s worth following a recovery plan because there are various options that you probably don’t want to be considering during the middle of a full-blown crisis.
Remember that data can only be restored reliably if the underlying metadata (configuration) is consistent between the backup snapshot and your org. That’s why you need backups of both your data and metadata.
Having the ‘Restore’ permission means you can restore metadata and data from the backup job’s snapshots to the org being backed up - or to any other org you have access to in Gearset.
To restore from your backups, click View details on a backup job:
This takes you to the Data backup history page:
From here, you can run a full restore by clicking Compare and restore metadata and following the straightforward process to restore the metadata of the org being backed up. You can then run Configure data restore to restore the data via the data restore workflow.
Alternatively, click Replicate metadata and data to restore or reset the data and/or metadata of an org other than the one being backed up:
In some cases, you might only need to restore a few customer records that have been deleted or corrupted. To restore data quickly, Gearset gives you a quick restore option that lets you select and restore single records - assuming there haven’t been any significant changes to the data configuration!
To access the quick restore workflow, click View details for a backup job run on the Data backup history page. Then select the specific object from the Backup details:
For the selected object, Gearset shows you the records that have been deleted, changed or added. Select the relevant records to run the quick restore:
If you need to restore referenced objects along with your selected individual records, use the Configure restore option to launch the full data restore workflow instead of continuing with the quick restore.
Want to try out Gearset’s backup and restore tools?
If you’re using Gearset and want to try our backup and restore solution for yourself, just give us a shout, and we’ll get you set up straight away. If you’re new to Gearset, book a demo by getting in touch with our knowledgeable sales team at [email protected] or sign up for your free trial today. You can also reach out to us with any questions via the live chat on this page or in the app - we’d love to hear from you!