How to Restore Salesforce History, Share and FeedItems

When backing up your data, you can include the following ‘group’ tables in the backups, relating to Salesforce objects

• sObjectFeed (i.e. AccountFeed,ContactFeed, OpportunityFeed,Custom Object_Feed, etc.)
• sObjectShare (i.e. AccountShare, ContactShare, OpportunityShare, Custom Object_Share, etc.)
• sObjectHistory (i.e. AccountHistory,ContactHistory, OpportunityHistory, Custom_Object_History, etc.)

The key reason to backup these objects up is to ensure there is a complete audit of data, to help you meet your compliance and industry regulation requirements.

What can be restored?

sObjectFeed

• For this table, the records contained are read-only and cannot be restored directly
• This table will present all chatter-related and field tracking data against the object (Account, Contacts, Leads, etc.)
• *To restore the data in this group table, records must be added to the FeedItem object. The FeedItem object is the source object for all sObjectFeed tables and adding records to the FeedItem object will show up in the relevant sObjectFeed table

sObjectShare

• For this table, the records contained can be restored
• The table presents the records that are used by Salesforce to determine what a user can access on a particular record, as per the org’s Sharing and Visibility Rules, Apex Managed Sharing, and Manual Shares
• When restoring a record, the Sharing and Visibility rules configured within the Salesforce org will automatically generate new Share records
• If you have Apex Managed Sharing in place, sharing records will be added/removed in the following circumstances:
  • Once a record is saved
  • If sharing rules are recalculated due to a change to the Object’s organization-wide sharing default

In the event of a data loss or corruption restoration, the sharing rules, including Apex Managed Sharing, will be recalculated (please see this article for more information). This will in turn restore the missing share records generated by Apex Managed Sharing and an import would not be required.

• If you have Manual Sharing activated in the Salesforce org; you will need to import any Share records that have a RowCause value of ‘Manual’ using apex data loader or a third party ETL tool of choice.
• When restoring records to this table, it is recommended that Sharing and Visibility rule calculations are deferred until the import has been completed successfully. For more information, please see this Salesforce article.
• Apex Sharing Reasons
  • If Using Custom Apex Sharing Reasons via Automation, it is recommended to rerun that automation to natively recreate those sharing records. However if there is a limit to this automation or you utilize Apex Sharing Reasons via a manual process, then please refer to the preceding guidance on Manual Sharing.

sObjectHistory

• For this table, the records contained are read-only
• The table will contain History records relating to field value changes to records
• The records for this table cannot be restored as this is considered an audit object by Salesforce and records cannot be created or updated by a user directly

To include these objects in backups?

Navigate to the Backup Exclusions tab, in the Backup Exclusion Rules table, hover over the exclusion rule relating to the sObject you want to include in the backup, click the X icon to remove the exclusion rule.