# Who to hire for Own backup on Salesforce Own Recover is now Salesforce Backup & Recover. Hire the partner who will run a restore drill before configuring anything, and who can say exactly what is in scope. **Published:** 2026-04-21 **Canonical:** https://synconai.com/hire-own-salesforce-partner **Author:** SynconAI Architecture Team ## In short Hire a partner who proves recovery before they configure backup. Salesforce completed the Own acquisition on 18 November 2024, and Own Recover is now Salesforce Backup & Recover. The right person has Platform Data Architect level skill, plans a restore drill into a sandbox, and can explain which objects, metadata and files are in scope. ## Sources - **Salesforce Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Own Company** (retrieved 2024-11-18) https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2024/09/05/salesforce-signs-definitive-agreement-to-acquire-own-company/ > Salesforce completed its acquisition of Own Company on November 18, 2024. - **Own’s Data Resilience Tools, Now Part of Salesforce** (retrieved 2026-10-10) https://www.salesforce.com/platform/own-integration/ > Own Recover, ranked the #1 Enterprise SaaS Backup by G2, is now Salesforce Backup & Recover. - **Own’s Data Resilience Tools, Now Part of Salesforce** (retrieved 2026-10-13) https://www.salesforce.com/platform/own-integration/ > Teams can recover specific subsets of data and metadata down to the minute and field level. - **Own’s Data Resilience Tools, Now Part of Salesforce** (retrieved 2026-10-13) https://www.salesforce.com/platform/own-integration/ > We've enhanced Data Mask & Seed with new seeding capabilities from Own Accelerate, enabling development teams to quickly generate secure, realistic test data in Sandboxes. ## What to take away - A backup nobody has restored is a hope, so the first engagement should be a restore drill into a sandbox, with a named person timing it. - Look for Salesforce Certified Platform Data Architect depth, plus Platform Administrator or Development Lifecycle and Deployment Architect for the sandbox and release side. - The statement of work must list the objects, the metadata types and the retention rules in scope. "All your data" is not a scope. - Money sits elsewhere: see [Own Salesforce implementation cost](/own-salesforce-implementation-cost) for the project and the licence page for the subscription. This guide helps you choose, not rank. ## The guide Most backup projects fail quietly. Nobody notices until a bad data load overwrites two hundred thousand contact phone numbers, someone opens the backup console, and the question shifts from "do we have a backup?" to "how long until the sales team can work again?". A good partner asked that second question before the first configuration screen was opened. A weak one sold you the first. The product has also changed its name, and that matters when you hire. Salesforce completed its acquisition of Own Company on November 18, 2024. The vendor's own page now says: "Own Recover, ranked the #1 Enterprise SaaS Backup by G2, is now Salesforce Backup & Recover." Buyers still search for OwnBackup and many partner websites still advertise Own, so part of your screening is checking that the firm knows today's names: Backup & Recover, Archive, Data Mask & Seed, and the Shield monitoring capabilities that absorbed Own Secure. The detail is on [Salesforce's Own integration page](https://www.salesforce.com/platform/own-integration/). A bidder who cannot map the old names to the new ones has not worked on this recently. ## What you are actually hiring someone to do Backup work looks small from the outside, which is exactly why it gets under-scoped. A partner on this product does four jobs. First, they define the protected estate: which objects, fields, metadata and related records matter enough to recover. Second, they set cadence and retention, which is a business decision dressed up as a configuration choice. Third, they build and rehearse the recovery procedure, including the awkward cases such as restoring children before parents, or restoring only the records touched by a failed integration. Fourth, they connect the product to the work your developers already do, because the same family now covers sandbox seeding. Salesforce says: "We've enhanced Data Mask & Seed with new seeding capabilities from Own Accelerate, enabling development teams to quickly generate secure, realistic test data in Sandboxes." Archive is a fifth job that some buyers forget until storage bills arrive. Salesforce describes it this way: "Archive streamlines data management by efficiently archiving inactive records at scale, optimizing data storage spend." That is a different decision from backup, because archived records leave the live org and your retention policy, not your recovery objective, drives the design. A partner who treats the two as one project will either over-archive or under-protect. ## Why a generic CRM project plan does not fit A standard implementation plan runs from requirements through build and test to go-live, and then the team disperses. Backup does not behave like that. There is no business process to design and no user interface to adopt. The deliverable is a capability that most people hope never to use, and that has to work on an unplanned day, under pressure, operated by someone who may not have been involved in setting it up. That changes what you should ask for. A generic project manager will measure progress by configuration completed. You want progress measured by evidence: a scope signed off by the data owners, a drill timed and compared, a runbook tested by someone new. It also changes who should sit in the room. The people who matter most are often not the Salesforce administrators but the owners of the data, such as the head of customer operations or the finance lead who knows which fields feed revenue reporting. A partner who runs workshops only with IT will produce a technically tidy scope that omits the fields the business would miss first. The other mistake is to size the work by the number of objects. Ten objects with deep parent and child structures and heavy integration traffic are harder to recover safely than fifty flat reference tables. Ask bidders how they measure complexity, and be suspicious of anyone who answers with a record count alone. ## Skills and certifications to look for Ask for named people, not firm credentials. For this product the useful Salesforce certifications are Salesforce Certified Platform Data Architect, because the hard part is data volume, relationships and ownership skew; Salesforce Certified Platform Administrator, because someone must read the permission model that determines who can see recovered data; and Salesforce Certified Platform Development Lifecycle and Deployment Architect, because seeding and metadata restore interact with your release pipeline. You can check any of these on the person's public Trailblazer profile. The certificate is a floor. The skill that actually separates candidates is a habit of thinking about failure. Ask the consultant to describe the last restore they performed, what broke, and what they changed afterwards. Someone who has only configured backups will describe screens. Someone who has restored will describe sequence, validation and the awkward phone call with the business owner. ## A first engagement: the restore drill Do not start with the configuration. Start with a two to three week restore drill scoped around one realistic disaster. A good candidate scenario is a flawed bulk update to a single object with child records, because it exercises dependencies without involving the whole org. Size it by the depth of the data, not the length of the object list. One object with several child objects and a busy integration is a better test than many simple objects, and it keeps the first engagement short enough to finish while the sponsor still cares. Agree in advance what a pass looks like: the restored records match the export, the sequence is documented, and the elapsed time is something the business has accepted in writing. The drill has five steps. The partner agrees the protected scope with you and writes it down. They configure the minimum needed to protect that scope. They then simulate the damage in a sandbox, and recover it, with a named person from your team timing each stage. They compare restored records with a known-good export, field by field. Finally they write the procedure as a runbook that an administrator who was not in the room could follow. Salesforce's own description of the capability sets a useful bar: "Teams can recover specific subsets of data and metadata down to the minute and field level." Your drill should test whether that precision is something your team can actually use under pressure, not whether the vendor can claim it. If the drill reveals that the restore takes far longer than your business can tolerate, you have bought valuable information cheaply. It is far better to learn it in week three than during an incident. ## Seeding and masking are their own work package Because the product family now includes sandbox seeding, many proposals bundle it into the backup project. Resist that, or at least price it as a separate package with its own owner. Seeding answers a developer's question, which is how to get realistic data into a sandbox quickly. Backup answers an operations question, which is how to get production back. They share a vendor but not a purpose, and they fail differently. The risk with seeding is privacy rather than loss. Realistic test data is often real customer data, so the partner needs a masking approach that you can defend to your privacy officer: which fields are masked, how referential links survive masking, and who may seed which sandbox. Ask for the masking rules in writing, and ask who reviews them when a new sensitive field is added. If your developers rely on partial or full sandboxes for regular testing, add a short test where a developer seeds a sandbox from scratch using the partner's documented method, and a privacy owner inspects the result. That small exercise tells you more about the partner's discipline than a slide on data governance. ## Ten questions to put to every bidder 1. Which of our objects would you leave out of the first scope, and why? 2. How would you restore a parent record and its children in the right order after a bad load? 3. What do you do about files, attachments and big data volumes when recovering? 4. How do you validate that a restored record matches what existed before the damage? 5. How does your plan handle records that other systems have since changed through integrations? 6. Who decides retention, and how do you turn a compliance requirement into a policy? 7. How would Archive and Backup & Recover divide the work for our largest object? 8. What happens to sandbox seeding and data masking, and who owns the masking rules? 9. Which user can run a restore, and how do we stop that becoming a route to see restricted data? 10. What will you hand over so our administrators can run the next drill without you? Good answers are specific and slightly uncomfortable. Weak answers are confident and generic. If a firm answers question one by saying everything is in scope, they have not understood that protection has a cost in storage, noise and complexity. ## Red flags specific to backup work Treating backup as a one-off configuration is the main one. The estate changes with every release, so a partner who does not propose a recurring review of new objects and fields will leave you protecting last year's org. Promising a recovery time without testing is another. Any number offered before the drill is a guess, however confidently delivered. Be equally wary of partners who conflate backup with a data migration or integration project, or who suggest that a native Salesforce feature such as a sandbox refresh replaces a proper backup. A refresh gives you a development copy, not a point-in-time recovery of production. Finally, watch for a plan that gives a single administrator all the power. Restore access is access to everything, so the design should include a separation of duties, and the approval trail should be as visible as the recovery itself. ## Checking evidence without logos Logos prove that a firm once met a company. They say nothing about whether a restore worked. Ask instead for an anonymised runbook or a redacted drill report, and for a reference who can describe an actual recovery, even a small one. Ask what the reference would do differently, and whether the partner's procedure was still being used a year later. Also read the partner's own material critically. Strong firms publish practical explanations of restore sequencing, retention trade-offs or seeding strategy. Weak ones reuse the vendor's feature list. You can compare either against [Own's Salesforce integration page](https://www.salesforce.com/platform/own-integration/) to see whether the firm adds anything the vendor does not already say. ## Commercial models and the statement of work Backup projects suit a small fixed-scope discovery followed by either a fixed price for configuration and the drill, or a capped time-and-materials arrangement for the broader rollout. Open-ended time and materials works poorly because the end state, a rehearsed runbook, is easy to define. | Item in the statement of work | What to insist on | | --- | --- | | Protected scope | Named objects, metadata types and files, plus what is deliberately excluded | | Retention and archive rules | Written policy with a named business owner and sign-off | | Restore drill | A defined scenario, a timed result and a field-level comparison | | Runbook | A procedure an administrator can follow without the author present | | Access and approvals | Who can restore, who approves, and how it is logged | | Seeding and masking | Which sandboxes are seeded, from which data, with which masking rules | | Handover | Training for named staff and a date for the first unaided drill | Add acceptance criteria that depend on the drill result rather than on the partner finishing their hours. For pricing context, use [Own Salesforce implementation cost](/own-salesforce-implementation-cost) and the licence page rather than inferring anything from a proposal. ## When you can skip a partner A small org with a modest number of objects, no regulatory retention requirement, and an administrator who is comfortable with the product's recovery workflow can reasonably run this without outside help. The test is whether that administrator can complete the restore drill described above, unaided, against a sandbox, and write the runbook. If they can, pay for a one-off review instead of a project. Bring in a partner when the org is large, when data comes in through many integrations, when sandbox seeding is a regular task for several teams, or when an auditor will ask for evidence of retention. The decision whether to adopt the product at all belongs on [should I migrate from Own](/should-i-migrate-from-own), and the background on the deal is on [what happened to Own](/what-happened-to-own). ## Questions ### Is Own still a separate product I should hire for? Salesforce completed the Own Company acquisition on 18 November 2024, and Own Recover is now Salesforce Backup & Recover. Hire for the current product names, and check that any firm you shortlist uses them correctly and can describe Archive, Data Mask & Seed and Backup & Recover separately. ### Which Salesforce certifications matter for a backup and recovery partner? Salesforce Certified Platform Data Architect is the most relevant, because data volume and relationships drive the design. Platform Administrator covers the permission model, and Platform Development Lifecycle and Deployment Architect helps where sandbox seeding and metadata releases are involved. Ask for named individuals. ### What should the first engagement with an Own partner look like? A restore drill. The partner agrees a written scope, protects it, simulates a realistic failure in a sandbox, restores it with a named person timing each step, and compares the result with a known-good export. The deliverable is a runbook your administrators can follow unaided. ### How do I tell Archive work from backup work in a proposal? Backup protects records you want to recover, and its design follows your tolerance for data loss. Archive moves inactive records out of the live org to control storage, and its design follows retention policy. A proposal that blends them without separate scope lines is a warning sign. ### Can a small team skip the partner entirely? Often, yes. If your administrator can run a timed sandbox restore and write the runbook without help, a short review is enough. Bring a partner in for large data volumes, many integrations, regular sandbox seeding or an audit requirement for retention evidence. --- SynconAI is a Salesforce Select Partner and an OpenAI Select Partner, delivering architect-led Salesforce and AI programmes across the United States and Australia. Related service: Managed services (https://synconai.com/salesforce-managed-services).