Any Administrator or Super User has experienced the painful realisation that something has gone wrong. It may have been an automation rule, an import, or a discrepancy between Salesforce and Account Engagement. Unfortunately, there isn’t a magical undo button for these things. However, if you follow good practices, you can protect your account against issues caused by mistakes.
There are different data types available in Account Engagement:
- Data – this refers to Prospects. Prospects syncing with Salesforce have related data such as Opportunities, Accounts and Custom Objects which are read-only.
- Assets – this refers to Email Templates, Forms, Form Handlers, Layout Templates, Landing Pages, Custom Redirects, Engagement Programs, Lists, Automation Rules, etc.
Data backups are a full copy of your database, they can be used to restore earlier versions of the data. This is a common practice for Salesforce or other database systems. You can achieve data backups in a few ways. Here we will look at how you can back up your Account Engagement Prospect data.
Manual Backup
At Nebula, we recommend that our customers take a weekly export of their entire Prospect database. To do this:
1. Go to the Prospects tab and click on Pardot Prospects.
2. Filter the table to display all Prospects, created ‘all time’.
3. Select the Tools tab and select CSV Export.
4. Name your CSV file and select the type of export you require:
5. This may take a while to generate, and you’ll receive an email once the file is ready for download. You can access all exports by going to Pardot Settings > Exports, the file can be downloaded for 60 days from the date of generation:
We recommend downloading this file and storing it in a secure location in case there is a need to restore the data.
API Backup
The Account Engagement API allows you to export Prospect data. Set up an integration user for a backup service, or to use tools such as Heroku or AWS to run the code to generate the export file. The benefits of using the API are:
- Ability to schedule the backup
- Ability to export visitor activities (and query activities)
- Flexibility, as you can choose between a complete snapshot of the data or a delta backup from a specific point in time
However, keep in mind that the authentication process will need to be followed. While it is secure, more of your code will be used for authentication.
Other Options
There are many tools out there for backing up your Salesforce data regularly, such as OwnBackup, Gearset or Spanning Backup etc. Salesforce also offers this paid service too. Salesforce backups are great for Account Engagement data that is synced to Salesforce because we can access certain marketing data, even though we can’t edit the data from Salesforce. For example, Prospect Score or Source Campaign. If you do have regular Salesforce backups, and something has gone wrong, I would take a look at the data available here. A Prospect import may be what you need to do to restore this information.
Alternatively, if your Salesforce Administrator has enabled Field History Tracking and this is set on a field where something has gone wrong, you can run a report on the changes to the field to find which data has been affected. Bear in mind, this can only be set for up to 20 fields per object, so it could be unlikely that all the data affected is trackable via this method.
Backup Frequency
How often should you back up your data? I’d recommend doing this daily. If you’d rather do this on a weekly basis, I’d always recommend manually generating a backup file before any major updates.
Implementing scoring? Take a full Prospect export first! Running an automation rule to fix some data? Backup!
Now you know the drill, you can sleep easily at night knowing your data is safe.
If you’d like to know more about data best practices or need some support with finding a solution to a Salesforce or Account Engagement problem, get in touch.
