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In this episode of Data Unleashed, we discuss the intricacies of Salesforce’s recycle bin, a crucial tool for data recovery within the Salesforce platform. The Salesforce recycle bin acts much like a safety net, allowing users to recover accidentally deleted data. However, the recycle bin has a retention limit of just 15 days. This means if a deletion error goes unnoticed for more than 15 days, the data is permanently lost, posing significant risks to data integrity and continuity.
Luckily with a self-hosted Salesforce backup solution, you have an infinite-depth recycle bin at your disposal.
Understanding the Salesforce Recycle Bin
The Salesforce recycle bin is an essential feature for managing data deletions. When an item is deleted, it isn’t immediately purged from the system; instead, it moves to the recycle bin where it stays for up to 15 days before permanent deletion. This feature includes various components:
- Deleted Items: This includes records from standard and custom objects, documents, and attachments.
- Storage Quota: The recycle bin has a storage limit, which is a percentage of your overall data storage.
- Recovery Process: Users can recover deleted items directly from the recycle bin unless they have been permanently purged after the 15-day period or if the bin exceeds its storage capacity, causing the oldest items to be permanently deleted sooner.
How the Recycle Bin Works
When records are deleted, they are moved to the recycle bin. This movement is temporary, providing a buffer against accidental data loss. Users can view and restore deleted records from the recycle bin, or they can choose to empty the recycle bin, permanently deleting the contents. It’s crucial for users to understand that once the recycle bin is emptied or the 15-day period has passed, data recovery becomes much more complex and potentially impossible without a backup solution.
Deleted Salesforce Records May Be Automatically Purged From Bin
Deleted records impact the recycle bin in terms of storage. If the volume of deleted data exceeds the bin’s capacity, older items will be permanently removed to make room for newer deletions. This automatic purging underscores the importance of timely data recovery practices and highlights the limitations of the recycle bin in handling large volumes of data or critical data deletions.
Why Consider a Self-Hosted Salesforce Backup Solution?
With the self-hosted approach, you can specify object retention policies within your recycle bin, guaranteeing that you’ll never lose the Salesforce data you might need after it’s been deleted – whether on purpose or by accident. Your backups live behind your firewall, where you can have the database purge any data on the schedule that makes sense for your requirements.
Tune in each Tuesday for more episodes of Data Unleashed, and discover all the tips and tricks to help you get more value from your investment in Salesforce. If you are looking for a fast, easy, and highly-secure way to protect your Salesforce data & metadata, we would love to hear from you! Reach out to an SFDC data expert or send us a message on LinkedIn!
Video Transcription
My name is Drew Niermann, and this is Data Unleashed, the video blog series dedicated to helping you get more out of your investment in Salesforce.
So we’re gonna start today’s episode with a little quiz about Salesforce’s recycle bin. Do you happen to know how many days deleted data gets retained in Salesforce? If you accidentally delete it? If you’re thinking the answer is 15 days, you would be correct. So congrats to you.
But what if somebody deleted some data, and they didn’t realize it was gone until day 16 or later? Salesforce does not retain the data after that point. And once it’s gone, it’s gone forever, there is no getting it back.
Or maybe someone deletes something, goes to the recycle bin, and they perform a hard delete and clear it out of the recycle bin before the 15-day timer is up. Also in that scenario, that data is gone forever, you’ll never get it back.
Here’s a scenario where unleashing the power of a self-hosted solution is really, really powerful. So think about this. What if you had an infinite-depth, Salesforce recycle bin with object-specific retention policies that you could specify however you want?
That’s exactly what you can do if you take a self-hosted approach to Salesforce backup and recovery. And what I mean by self-hosted is your backups, living behind your firewall in a nonproprietary, standard relational database, where you can get at that data, specify the retention policies, preserve all of the referential integrity of the data model, and then have the database purge the data from your on-prem recycle bin or your self-hosted cloud-based recycle bin on a schedule that makes sense for your data retention and compliance requirements.
So if this is something that you’ve never thought about, or you find interesting, please drop me a note on LinkedIn It’s something that we see every day and we help enterprise Salesforce customers around the world solve this problem every day.
Thank you so much for watching. My name is Drew Niermann and you’re watching data Data Unleashed.
