Why might I choose to overwrite field values when restoring large amounts of data?

Spanning Backup for Salesforce gives you the ability to overwrite field values when performing a bulk restore. This feature will help Salesforce admins and developers when restoring Objects owned by inactive users, or when populating Sandboxes with sensitive data.

1. Objects owned by inactive users: We heard from Salesforce admins that they want to be able to restore Objects owned by inactive users, but assign a different owner to those Objects at the time of restore, rather than needing to change settings in their Salesforce org or reactivate those users just for the restore. Now you can set a new owner for records in the restore process simply by specifying the new owner by Salesforce User ID. This means that admins do not need an additional Salesforce license to reactivate the user for a restore. If there is no additional license available, admins would no longer have to deactivate a different active user, and then reactivate the user who is the owner of the records. 

2. Protecting sensitive data when populating sandboxes: Salesforce admins and developers in highly regulated industries who have sensitive data in Salesforce (Personally Identifiable Information, or PII, such as Social Security Numbers, Credit Card Numbers, or healthcare data) told us they would like the option to mask / overwrite field values for specific fields when they restore data from a backup of their production instance into a sandbox. Currently, they need to have processes in place in the Sandbox environment that will ensure the data is masked after it is already in the Sandbox. Admins and developers instead prefer that sensitive data be masked during the restoration process itself. The new overwrite feature in Spanning will allow customers to choose the Object type and field name, and either choose Random value or provide a specific field value to be overwritten in Spanning’s bulk restore flow so the sensitive data never lands in a Sandbox.  When random value is chosen, Spanning will generate unique values so that each restored record has a different value overwritten during the restoration process. 

3. Populating values for required fields during restore: In case you added a new required field and are restoring data using Spanning, the overwrite field values feature will let you populate the value of the required field at the time of restore. This will help you restore the data back into Salesforce without error. 

If you want to seed sandboxes and would like to save the overwritten values as templates, rather than making the selections manually and repeatedly each time you seed a sandbox - you can do so by following the steps listed Can I save my selections for overwriting fields. With Spanning, you can create, and then reuse, templates for overwriting field values. This will allow the object types, field names and field values to all be masked in a single click instead of setting each up manually. 

To overwrite field values in a same-org restore by searching for records, follow the steps mentioned here: What is Spanning Backup for Salesforce Bulk Restore?

To overwrite field values in a same-org restore by uploading a CSV file, follow the steps mentioned here: Can I restore Salesforce data by importing a CSV file?

To overwrite field values in a cross-org restore by uploading a CSV file, follow the steps mentioned here: 
how do i perform a cross-org restore

To see a demonstration of using Spanning Backup for Salesforce to overwrite field values, please watch this video below:

Have more questions?

Contact us

Was this article helpful?
0 out of 0 found this helpful

Provide feedback for the Documentation team!

Browse this section