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There is a bit of information around which discusses backing up Salesforce using the data export capabilities or one of the data loader tools to download SF data into text files or ar relational database.

What isn't often mentioned is how to restore this data.

Because Salesforce does not permit you to dictate the ID of the record you are inserting, any moderately complicated data model which has inter-relationships between objects poses a difficulty as you won't be able to maintain these relationships.

I have done it by using external Id fields, but this means my data model really needs to have fields in it to support a data restore, not something I see mentioned in any documentation.

So my questions are thus:

  1. Can the ID field be dictated in a data upload if this is requested from support?
  2. If it can't, how do people handle resolving these relationships?
  3. What tools exist which elegantly and simply solve this problem?
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I do not believe that Id fields will be made writeAble even though you can request this for other audit fields such as CreatedDate

Whenever I've had to transfer data, I've used the External Id field approach to join them up and it works quite well, but as you say you need to explicitly create these fields and then use them in Dataloader mappings.

As far as tools are concerned, I've come across Monarch from Dreamfactory which lets you seamlessly move (related) data into Salesforce Orgs.

Just as a backup tool, DBAmp tends to be quite popular.

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OwnBackup is a great tool. It will backup your data automatically, and then when you want to restore it, it has tool that will automatically generate files for you to thread the relationships back together.

Were you asking with regards to a dataloss scenario, or for environment replications purposes?

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