Key concepts
A few ideas come up everywhere in bluefactory. Understanding them makes every module easier to use.
Account, orgs, and users
- Account — your company's bluefactory workspace. It holds your team members, connected orgs, settings, and subscription.
- Salesforce org — a Salesforce environment (production or sandbox) connected to bluefactory. One account can connect several orgs, and every backup, tracker, or analysis belongs to exactly one org.
- Users — the people on your team. The person who created the account is its owner; owners manage the team and control what each member can access with Access Management.
Backups and snapshots
- A backup is a configuration: which org, which objects, how often, and where the data is stored.
- Every time a backup runs, it produces a snapshot — a point-in-time copy of your data, files, and metadata, with a detailed report of what was captured.
- Snapshots are the foundation of the platform. Restore, Query Console, sandbox seeding, duplicate detection, and archive verification all read from snapshots — never from your live org — so exploring your data has zero impact on Salesforce performance or API limits.
Full and incremental backups
- A full backup captures every record in scope on every run.
- An incremental backup captures a full copy once, then only the records that changed since the previous run. Incremental backups are faster and lighter on your Salesforce API usage, and bluefactory transparently reconstructs the complete picture whenever you use the snapshot. You can also schedule periodic full snapshots to keep things tidy. See Full vs. incremental backups.
Scope
The scope defines exactly which data an operation touches: which objects, which related objects, and which records (via filters). Backup, Restore, Archive, and Purge all share the same visual scope builder, so once you've learned it you can use it everywhere. See Building a scope.
Retention (Backup) vs. Archive vs. Purge
Three different tools remove or preserve data in different ways — choosing the right one matters:
| Keeps a copy? | Removes from Salesforce? | Typical use | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Backup | Yes — every snapshot | No | Insurance against data loss |
| Archive | Yes — verified before deletion | Yes | Freeing Salesforce storage, retention policies |
| Purge | No copy is kept | Yes | Compliance erasure, permanent disposal |
See Backup vs. Archive vs. Purge for a deeper comparison.
Prepared snapshots
Interactive features such as the Query Console work fastest on a prepared snapshot — one that has been loaded into a fast query workspace ahead of time. Wherever you pick a snapshot, a readiness badge tells you whether it's prepared or still cold, and a Prepare button warms it up in the background. See Preparing snapshots.
Where your data is stored
By default, snapshots are stored in bluefactory's managed, encrypted cloud storage. You can instead connect your own cloud storage (for example an Amazon S3 bucket) so that backup data never leaves infrastructure you control. See Cloud Storage.