Backing up sales data: what your vendor does, and what is still your job

Software providers generally operate infrastructure designed to survive their own failures. That is real and useful, and it is also not the thing that usually harms small businesses. What harms small businesses is their own data being changed or removed by their own people: a bulk edit applied to the wrong filter, an import that overwrites rather than appends, a departing employee clearing records, a lost administrator account.

Whether and how a provider can help in those situations varies considerably, and the only reliable way to know is to ask them directly and record the answer. Treat any general statement about how these services work, including this one, as a prompt to check rather than as a description of your own arrangement.

Four of the five originate inside the organisation. That distribution is the argument for holding your own copy, and it is also the argument for treating access management as part of the same plan rather than as a separate concern.

Automate what you can

A manual monthly export lasts about a quarter before somebody is on leave and the habit lapses. If your tools can schedule exports, use that. If not, attach the task to something that already happens reliably, such as the monthly close, and give it a named owner rather than assigning it to the team.

Export before anything bulk

Before any import, mass update, merge operation or field change, take an export. This single habit prevents the most common form of real data loss, and it costs a few minutes. It is also the moment when people are most inclined to skip it, because bulk operations usually happen under time pressure.

Check the file, once in a while

Open it. Confirm that notes and activity are present rather than only contact rows. Confirm that the relationships between deals and accounts are recoverable. Most people discover on their first inspection that something they assumed was included is not, and the point of the exercise is to discover that while it is still hypothetical.

Backups are copies of personal data, so they carry the same obligations as the live system. That sits uncomfortably alongside a deletion request, since the point of a backup is that it retains what the live system no longer holds. Businesses handle this in different ways, commonly by limiting how long backups are retained and by documenting how deletion requests are handled with respect to them. There is no universal answer, the correct approach depends on your jurisdiction and circumstances, and it is worth deciding deliberately with proper advice rather than during the first request you receive.

What is exported, how often, by whom, to where, kept for how long, disposed of how. Who has administrative access and who is the second person. What happens when someone leaves. How a rebuild would work. Review annually and when you change systems. A plan that exists only in one person understanding of the situation is the same single point of failure that the plan was meant to remove.

Related reading on data and systems: what is a CRM, features, CRM versus Excel, lead management software, CRM for small business, and tools.