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Comment by Lornedon | Hacker News Reader

I'm a pretty new Salesforce admin, and so far it has been a horrible experience. Apart from its horribly sluggish user experience, developing for it as also very frustrating.

You can't restore backups! You can export your data, but there's no way to import it, because you can't set the object Id or autonumbered fields (like the case number, which gets communicated to the customer). They used to provide an extremely expensive recovery service, but they stopped doing that. That's just unbelievable for a business product.

I also can't count how many times I looked up an issue and found an "Ideas" post that's over ten years old, with 10k upvotes and no reaction from Salesforce at all. Id doesn't seem like they work on the core product anymore, they just release new things that you need a license for.

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> You can't restore backups! You can export your data, but there's no way to import it, because you can't set the object Id or autonumbered fields

Have you tried marking fields for user set IDs as external IDs. This field can then be used while doing upsert. But what do you mean by there is no way to import it? Apart from Dataloader there are a host of companies that offer this feature.

Suppose a bad actor has gotten full access to our Salesforce, deleted everything and emptied out the recycling bin. We need to restore everything.

Luckily, we used the weekly export feature and have all our data, we only need to get it back into Salesforce. But how do we do that?

- Dataloader can only restore one object at a time. We have 350 different objects.

- We need to restore the relationships between objects. They are saved by Id, but we can't keep the original Id. So we have to keep track of the original Id and the new Id for each inserted record, and replace them in every other object. That also means we have to insert the objects in topological order. If there are any cycles or self-relationships (like Account.ParentAccount), we have to fill in the Field with NULL first and update it later.

- Even after all this effort, we still can't recreate the values for autonumbered fields. If it's a custom field, we can change the type to text, insert the values and change it back. For standard fields, there is no practical way to do it. No company can help us, because it's just impossible to do using the Salesforce API.

You have to buy a specialized backup product like Ownbackup or Spanner. These in turn, utilize Salesforce's bulk apis. Salesforce does not let anyone touch the underlying databases.

It's baffling that a product like Salesforce relies on paid third party products to deliver an essential feature like restoring backed up data.

And even those can't change autonumbered standard fields, like the case number. That's problematic, because they don't only live in Salesforce but get referenced from outside.

You have to adopt an ERP mindset when working with Salesforce. That is you are trying to satisfy auditors and have a clear permanent record. You do not update key fields like Case Number. Usually you deactivate or soft delete a record. You then repoint the external systems to the new record.

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