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Backupify offers instant Salesforce backups

In a win for data liberation, Backupify extended its Snapshot service to Salesforce.com on Tuesday, and promised that Evernote, Zoho and Basecamp will be next.
Written by Jason Hiner, Editor in Chief

In a win for data liberation, Backupify extended its Snapshot service to Salesforce.com on Tuesday, and promised that Evernote, Zoho and Basecamp will be next.

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(Credit: Backupify)

In 2012, it's fitting that the best way to backup a cloud app is with a cloud backup. That's where Backupify made its name — mostly doing cloud-managed backups of Google Apps — and now the company is expanding the service to the next big cloud app: Salesforce.com.

On Tuesday, Backupify launched Snapshot for Salesforce, which saves an instance of your Salesforce backup online on the Backupify servers, and also gives you the ability to grab all of the data as a download.

Backupify CEO Rob May said, "More than 1000 companies have used our Google Apps Snapshot product to download data from Google Apps. We interviewed those users, and Salesforce.com was the next service they wanted us to support."

Here is Backupify's published list of features for Snapshot for Salesforce:

  • Easy and seamless set-up with just a few clicks
  • Using OAuth 2.0, so no passwords are stored
  • Download all important objects and attachments with a single click
  • Unlike Salesforce downloads that only provides limited downloads and also restricts the usage. You can use Snapshot at your convenience
  • Downloaded data is secure and password protected, and saved in our AWS S3 instance for two weeks
  • During our beta phase, all the downloads are free.

On the Backupify site, here's how the company explains what its back-up service does: "Salesforce Snapshot extracts the content from your Salesforce database, converts it to a collection of intuitive CSVs, compresses it all into an easy-to-extract ZIP file and downloads it to your local machine."

Also note the published disclaimer: "Salesforce Snapshot is currently under beta, and will work only with Enterprise and Unlimited Salesforce.com editions."

What Backupify is doing is effectively playing to the fears and desires of IT leaders, who are attracted by moving apps to the cloud for the cost and simplification benefits, but are worried about letting go of control over important corporate data.

May said, "Companies want to move to the cloud to offload their application infrastructure and all the associated maintenance costs, but they are very concerned about keeping control of their data. Backupify provides a secure second copy of Google Apps, and now Salesforce.com data."

There are other tools that offer Salesforce.com backups, such as CloudAlly, but what Backupify is doing is providing the ability to quickly snag a moment-in-time backup that's saved both online and with the ability to download the data locally — and it's free (at least for now). Backupify is also launching a more fully functional service called Backupify for Salesforce that automates and centralises daily Salesforce backups and makes the data available for download at any time. This is a paid service.

With the launch of the free Salesforce Snapshot, Backupify also indicated that it's going to be launching Snapshot for Evernote, Zoho and Basecamp.

Via ZDNet US

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