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The Problem If you’ve ever managed a Salesforce org of any meaningful size, you know the backup situation is… not great. Salesforce gives you Weekly Export, which is a manual process that dumps CSVs once a week. For anything more sophisticated you’re looking at commercial solutions like OwnBackup or GRAX, which charge per user per month and quickly add up. I’ve seen the full spectrum. When I joined my current org, someone was manually downloading Weekly Export and dropping it on a file server. We moved to GRAX, which worked but cost a fortune at scale. After about a year of that I started building my own solution. It’s been running in production for years now, and I recently open-sourced it. Here’s the story of how it evolved.

The problem Recently I was tasked with tracking downloads of certain files in Salesforce, more specifically files related to Opportunities. This is a common problem where you want to know if a Sales person is downloading customer data to be able to bring some customers with them when they move on to a new employer. Using Salesforce shield was not an option, mainly because of the price, so it had to be done with “Standard Salesforce”, this is a term often heard but it usually means that we’re going to customise as hard as possible without installing anything from a 3rd party.

Introduction Ever since that GDPR date last year I’ve thinking a lot about social media and especially Facebook and Instagram. When I logged into Instagram the day after GDPR went into effect I just couldn’t accept the new terms, which is weird because blindly accepting EULAs has kind of been a think ever since I installed Windows for the first time. I just never accepted it and suddenly I didn’t have to endlessly scroll that feed while commuting, I listened more to my audiobooks instead. Still I sometimes ended up scrolling in the video feed of Facebook which was probably even worse.

About a year ago a friend made fun of me when I said I was using Wordpress, apparently Wordpress was not that hot anymore and he started talking about Hugo. Hugo is a static site generator where you write your posts in markdown and a generator written in Go generates your site as static content. There are some benefits here: You don’t rely on a database and an internet connection when writing a draft post You can host the site in an S3 bucket which means you don’t have to have a Linux server. Having no server means that you can’t be hacked One drawback is that a static site cannot have search and comments but these can be mitigated by using Algolia and Disqus.

More than 5 years ago I wrote an article on how to Mass delete Picklist values in Salesforce, this is still my most visited article and I have been meaning to get back to it for years. At least now it seems like it will be a part of the standard functionality sometime in the near future (mass delete picklist values (setup)) but today I had to do this at a customer so I had to solve it once again.