Why Backing Up Salesforce Matters for Non-Profits and Grantmakers
For many non-profit organisations, Salesforce holds essential information: contacts, funding applications, grant assessments, case notes, programme data, and reporting history. For grantmakers in particular, it often contains decision records, due-diligence notes, and sensitive correspondence.
While Salesforce itself is a highly reliable platform, it does not protect organisations from everyday operational risks, such as:
- Accidental deletion of records
- Incorrect updates or imports
- Errors caused by automation or system integrations
- Changes made in good faith that later need to be reversed
These issues are common and usually internal. When they occur, the critical question is not whether copies of data exist, but whether information can be restored quickly, accurately, and with confidence.
For non-profits, good backup practices support business continuity, data stewardship, and accountability – and help reduce the risk of disruption to funding, services, or reporting.
Salesforce Data Export
Salesforce Data Export is a built-in feature that allows organisations to download copies of Salesforce data as files on a schedule, typically weekly. These exports are provided as ZIP files containing spreadsheets (for example, a file containing all Contact records).
This approach can be useful for basic record-keeping, but it has important limitations:
- Restoring data is manual and time-consuming
- Recovering specific records or individual changes is difficult
- Only data is included – not metadata such as reports, page layouts, automation, or configuration
As a result, Data Export is best viewed as a basic safety net, rather than a practical recovery solution.
If you are on a support contract with Issimo, it is likely that we have scheduled your weekly Data Exports and automatically copy the files to secure cloud storage. While we take reasonable steps to manage this process, it is not a monitored or guaranteed backup service and is provided as a free add-on to support.
Dedicated Salesforce Backup Services
There are specialist providers that offer dedicated Salesforce backup solutions, including CloudAlly, Spanning, Own, and others. These services are designed specifically for recovery and typically:
- Run daily automated backups
- Include both data and system configuration
- Allow restores from specific points in time
This makes them more suitable for organisations who need confidence that their data can be recovered accurately following mistakes or unexpected issues.
Issimo Managed Backup Service
Issimo offers a fully managed Salesforce backup service using CloudAlly, designed for clients that want reassurance without administrative overhead.
For a monthly fee, we:
- Set up and monitor daily automated backups
- Act on any backup failures or issues
- Provide a monthly confirmation report
- Carry out an annual test restore to a Salesforce sandbox, demonstrating that data is genuinely recoverable
This service provides clear ownership and reduces uncertainty around whether backups are working, being checked, and would actually support recovery if needed.
For non-profits – and especially grantmakers – this supports good governance and reduces the risk that data issues disrupt funding processes, service delivery, or stakeholder confidence.
If Salesforce is an important system for your organisation, a managed backup service provides peace of mind that your data is protected – and recoverable – when it matters.
For more information around what Issimo can do to facilitate managed backups, please click this link.