Your CRM, Your Accounting, Your Helpdesk: The SaaS Apps Nobody Is Backing Up

A salesperson leaves. IT does the tidy thing and deletes the account. Three weeks later someone asks for the proposal history on a six-figure deal — and discovers it went with them. Not the email. The email was backed up. Everything else wasn’t.

The gap that opens after you fix email

Businesses that take backup seriously usually get Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace sorted first, and rightly so — that’s where most of the day-to-day lives. Then the project ends. Meanwhile the business is running a CRM, an accounting package, a helpdesk, a payroll system, a project tracker and a chat tool, each holding records nobody could rebuild from memory.

Ask a simple question about each of them: if the data in that app vanished tonight, where would the copy come from? For most businesses the honest answer, for most of those apps, is that there isn’t one.

What the providers actually promise

The assumption is that the vendor is holding a copy. What the vendors publish is narrower than that, and the windows are short.

Google Workspace is explicit about deleted users. Google’s own admin documentation states you can restore a user account “up to 20 days after deleting it,” and that “after 20 days, the data is gone and you can’t restore it.” Twenty days is less time than it takes most businesses to notice something is missing.

Salesforce used to run a last-resort Data Recovery Service. It retired it, brought it back after customer pushback, then — in Salesforce’s own words — “(re)retired” it in autumn 2021 alongside the launch of its paid Backup and Restore product. The official guidance now is to use that product or a partner tool from AppExchange. The safety net people assumed was there was deliberately removed.

This isn’t a quirk of two vendors. It’s the shared responsibility model working exactly as designed: the provider keeps the service running, you stay responsible for the data inside it. As Veeam puts it, replication by the provider “doesn’t protect against inadvertent deletion, corruption, or ransomware.” Uptime is not backup — a point worth re-reading if you’ve only ever thought about this for Microsoft 365.

How the data actually disappears

Dramatic breaches get the attention, but the losses we’re called about are usually mundane:

• Offboarding. Somebody leaves, the licence is reclaimed to save money, and their records go with the account.
• A bad bulk operation. One mis-mapped import or mass update rewrites thousands of CRM records in seconds, and the old values are simply gone.
• An integration behaving badly. Apps wired together with sync tools and API keys can overwrite or delete at machine speed, long before a person notices.
• Ransomware reaching the cloud. Anything synced to a desktop can be encrypted on the desktop and faithfully synced back up.
• A lapsed subscription. Stop paying and most vendors delete the tenant after a grace period. Check what yours is before you need to know.

What to do this quarter

This doesn’t need to be a project. It needs an afternoon and a list:

• Inventory the apps that hold records you can’t rebuild. Not every tool matters. The CRM, the accounting system and anything carrying client files almost certainly do.
• Read each vendor’s retention terms. Specifically: how long after deletion can it be recovered, and who has to ask. Write the number down next to the app.
• Don’t mistake an export for a backup. A CSV someone pulls occasionally isn’t versioned, isn’t scheduled, and usually can’t be restored back into the system as working records.
• Put real backup on the apps that matter. Independent, automated, with retention you control rather than the vendor’s window.
• Restore something. Pick one record, one mailbox, one folder, and bring it back. A backup nobody has restored from is a theory.

The pattern is the same one that applies to every server you’ve ever owned: your data, your copy, your control. Moving it into somebody else’s cloud changed where it lives. It didn’t move the responsibility.