Call it a safety net, an insurance policy, or the reason you sleep at night –your Salesforce backups play a critical role in business continuity and keeping your org running. And there’s more than what meets the eye: your backups contain a trove of data that can be used to accelerate innovation.
With Own Accelerate for Salesforce’s new Seed from Backup feature, users can easily leverage backups to make Salesforce sandbox seeding easier and faster. In this post, we unpack this important feature and how it elevates your sandbox objectives.
Put productivity first
Between development, testing, and training, your Salesforce sandbox is a hotbed for activity. Regardless of what's on different teams’ to-do lists, users should be able to make the most of this environment and avoid common sandbox seeding roadblocks along the way.
While seeding from production is advantageous for creating production-like environments, it comes with drawbacks: It can leave out specific datasets that may only exist in backups and tack on additional time from API calls. Plus, a sandbox refresh can wipe out a sandbox’s content (not to mention your confidence), widening the gap between start and finish.
With the Seed from Backup feature, teams can seamlessly populate sandbox environments with data from any backup, ensuring productivity is always a top priority. By avoiding hitting API consumption limits and long seeding times with large data volumes, your organization can truly focus on what matters: creating dynamic outcomes faster.
Debug with precision
Even with rigorous code review and automated testing, intermittent bugs can still infiltrate your production environment. Given their inconsistent nature, it’s hard to know when an intermittent bug will strike- forcing you to drop everything and troubleshoot when it does.
With the Seed from Backup feature, you can act with precision, taking the guesswork out of intermittent bugs. Instead of anticipating production bug recurrences, you can isolate the data from when the bug occurred, reproduce the bug and verify the fix with the backup data, and then deploy a hotfix to production. This way, you don't have to Sherlock Holmes your own sandbox (unless you want to, of course–no judgment).
Keep testing and training environments consistent
While sandboxes welcome experimentation and ingenuity, they must also be a safe haven for consistency. Developers should be able to train and test fearlessly without worrying that their hard work (and the environment as a whole) is at the whim of a refresh. Coupled with the common sandbox data-offloading and reloading practice which cuts into time and resources, developers deserve more than consistent inconsistency.
Let’s say you’re a Salesforce developer for a financial services company responsible for testing updated approval processes for loan applications. For this particular test scenario, your sandbox must be filled with current customer information, along with loan application and historical approval data. After weeks of testing, you’re asked to conduct a sandbox refresh, moving your work out of the existing sandbox and into a new one. Upon completion, you return back to the original sandbox, ready to pick up where you left off. But there’s one glaring problem: the sandbox refresh has wiped your sandbox, impeding you from continuing the test scenarios. Looks like those updated approval processes won’t be seeing the light of day for a while…
With Seed from Backup, you can retrieve set test data in a few clicks, streamlining processes and building team confidence. Refresh your sandbox and use Seed from Backup to seed data from the pre-refresh sandbox, restoring specific, test-critical data. With this capability, it’s easy to build a stable sandbox environment without compromising creativity.
See(d) Your Innovative Future with Own
Backups hold more than just your data’s past–they hold the key to your future, starting in your Salesforce sandbox. Own Accelerate’s new Seed from Backup feature enables you to easily fuse data from the past into your current sandbox environment, faster, easier, and more accurately.
Ready to see the difference that Accelerate can make in your sandboxes? Request a demo today.
