You’ve invested heavily in HubSpot. It’s the central nervous system of your commercial operations, meticulously configured to manage customer relationships, drive sales, and automate marketing. You have a backup system in place, and you assume it’s doing its job. But is it?
Many standard backup solutions, including native export functions, only scratch the surface. They capture the basics—like your contacts and companies—but miss the most valuable, and often most vulnerable, parts of your portal. This oversight can leave you dangerously exposed. When a data loss event occurs, you might find you can only recover a skeleton of your data, not the fully functional operational system you depend on.
Let’s explore the critical components that your current HubSpot backup might be missing and why they are essential for true business continuity.
1. Custom Objects: The Lifeblood of Your Tailored Operations
As your business grows, you move beyond HubSpot’s standard objects. You create custom objects to track unique data that’s specific to your industry or business model—perhaps "Projects," "Subscriptions," "Shipments," or "Properties." These objects are not just data containers; they are the architectural pillars of your bespoke processes.
Why are they so often missed?
Because they are non-standard, many simpler backup tools are not configured to recognise or capture them. They are designed to pull from default fields, leaving your custom architecture completely unprotected.
What is the risk of not backing them up?
Losing your custom object data is catastrophic. Imagine your sales team trying to manage ongoing subscriptions without any subscription records, or your project managers trying to track deliverables without their project data. You lose the very information that makes your HubSpot portal uniquely valuable to your business. Rebuilding this from scratch is not just an administrative headache; it represents a significant loss of business intelligence and operational capability.
2. Files and Attachments: The Unstructured, High-Value Data
Think about the sheer volume of files that flow through your HubSpot portal every day. Sales contracts attached to deals, proposals sent to prospects, marketing assets linked to campaigns, and support documentation tied to tickets. This "unstructured data" provides the critical context for your CRM records.
Why are they so often missed?
Backing up files is more complex than exporting a simple database. It requires a solution that can identify, extract, and securely store these attachments while maintaining their connection to the original CRM record. Many basic tools skip this step to save time and complexity.
What is the risk of not backing them up?
Losing these files creates a massive information vacuum. A deal record without the signed contract is just a number. A support ticket without the attached screenshot loses its context. From a legal and compliance perspective, the inability to produce these documents can have severe consequences. For day-to-day operations, it means your team is flying blind, missing the crucial evidence and resources they need to do their jobs effectively.
3. Metadata: The Hidden Framework Holding Everything Together
If objects and files are the bricks of your HubSpot portal, metadata is the mortar. It’s the invisible framework that gives your data structure, context, and meaning. It is, without question, the most critical and most frequently overlooked element in a backup strategy.
Metadata includes several key components:
- Associations: These are the vital links between your records. A contact is associated with a company, that company is linked to multiple deals, and those deals are tied to specific tickets. Without these associations, your data disintegrates into meaningless, disconnected lists. You can’t see a customer's history or understand the relationships between your commercial activities.
- Workflows: Your workflows are the engine of your portal, automating everything from lead nurturing to ticket escalations. They represent hundreds of hours of strategic planning and refinement. Losing them means your entire automation system grinds to a halt. Rebuilding them from memory is a near-impossible task, and the operational downtime would be crippling.
- Portal Structure (Pipelines, Properties, and Settings): The very architecture of your portal—your custom deal pipelines, your carefully defined properties, your user roles and permissions—is a form of metadata. This structure is what makes HubSpot work for you. A backup that doesn’t capture this configuration forces you to rebuild your entire operational environment from the ground up.
Is Your Backup Truly Comprehensive?
A backup solution that doesn’t protect your custom objects, files, and critical metadata is not a backup solution—it’s a liability. It provides a false sense of security that will crumble the moment you actually need to perform a recovery.
True business continuity requires a comprehensive, independent backup that captures every aspect of your HubSpot portal. It’s the only way to ensure that in the event of a disaster, you can restore not just your data, but your entire, fully-functional operational framework.
Don’t wait until it’s too late. Evaluate your current backup solution today. Does it protect everything, or are you leaving your most critical assets exposed?
