Winter '26 Update: The Salesforce Weekly Export Workflow Just Got Harder (And How to Fix It)

For years, Salesforce's Data Export Service (Weekly Export) has been the safety blanket for Admins.

Whether it’s for compliance, peace of mind, or a "better-safe-than-sorry" disaster recovery strategy, downloading those .zip files is a Friday ritual for thousands of Admins.

But if you rely on this native service to back up your Salesforce data, that ritual is about to get painful.

According to the Salesforce Winter '26 Release Notes (Release 216), a major change is rolling out that effectively ends the days of "click-and-done" exports. 

Here is what is changing, why it matters, and the affordable alternative that fixes it for good.

The Bad News: Rate Limiting on Data Exports

In an effort to safeguard platform stability, Salesforce is enforcing Rate Limiting on Data Export Downloads.

Previously, if your Org’s Salesforce data was large enough to be split into multiple .zip files, you could quickly click "Download" on all of them in rapid succession, or use a browser extension to grab them in a batch.

As of Winter '26, that is over.

The New Rules:

• 🚫 No Concurrent Downloads: You are now strictly limited to downloading one file at a time.
• ⏳ The 60-Second Penalty Box: After initiating a download, you must wait approximately 60 seconds before you can click the next one.
• ⚠️ The Error Message: If you try to click too fast, you will be hit with an HTTP 429 "Too Many Requests" error.

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The Real Cost: How Much Time Will You Waste?

It’s easy to dismiss a "60-second wait" as minor… until you look at the math. Large Salesforce Orgs split exports into multiple 512MB files. If you have a moderate amount of data, those minutes add up to hours of active, manual monitoring.

We ran the numbers on exactly how long you will need to sit at your computer to manually download your backups under the new rules.

Salesforce Weekly Export Download Times Under Winter '26 Rate Limiting 

Ask yourself: Do you have 7 hours on a Friday to sit and click a button once every minute?

The Solution: Odaseva Professional Edition

If you're looking for a Salesforce backup solution that eliminates this manual process without breaking the budget, Odaseva Professional edition is the "Easy Button" for Admins.  It automates the entire process and fixes the glaring security and restore gaps in the native Weekly Export (more on that below).

Here is how the two stack up side-by-side:

1. How Often Does Your Salesforce Data Get Backed Up? 

• ❌ Salesforce Weekly Export: You get a backup once every 7 days. If you lose data on Thursday, you are rolling back to last week's data.
• ✅ Odaseva Professional: Daily incremental backups. You get a full backup weekly, but crucial incremental backups run every single day. Your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) drops from 7 days to just 24 hours.

2. How Inefficient are Full Exports?

• ❌ Salesforce Weekly Export: Full exports only. Even if only 5 records changed, Salesforce exports everything. It’s heavy, slow, and produces massive files.
• ✅ Odaseva Professional: Smart Incremental backups. After the first full backup, it only pulls what changed. It’s faster, lighter on your API limits, and significantly more efficient.

3. Can You Actually Restore Your Salesforce Data When Disaster Strikes?

• ❌ Salesforce Weekly Export: CSV Nightmares. You get raw CSV files. They lack metadata and relationship structure. Restoring complex hierarchies (like Accounts with related Contacts and Cases) from flat CSVs is a manual, spreadsheet-vlookup nightmare.
• ✅ Odaseva Professional: True Restore Capabilities. It backs up the Data, Metadata, and Files. Because it understands the relationships, you can actually restore data, not just look at it in Excel. It also respects Salesforce permissions.

4. Is Your Backup Data Secure and Compliant?

• ❌ Salesforce Weekly Export: Clear Text CSVs. Your sensitive customer data is sitting in unencrypted CSV files on your laptop or local server.
• ✅ Odaseva Professional: Enterprise-Grade Security. It offers a "No-View Provider" model (Odaseva can't see your data) and 1-year retention accessible anytime. Your backups are encrypted and secure, not sitting in your "Downloads" folder.

5. How Easy Is It to Access Your Backups When You Need Them?

• ❌ Salesforce Weekly Export: You have a 48-hour window to download your files before they vanish. And now, with Winter '26, you have to download them one... by... one.
• ✅ Odaseva Professional: Your backups are always accessible. You can download them whenever you want, and the files are organized into folders by Object, making them easy to navigate.

The Bottom Line

The Winter '26 update forces a choice: spend your time fighting a 60-second download timer every week, or upgrade to a modern, automated solution.

Odaseva Professional takes the manual labor out of backups, giving you daily protection, real restore power, and total peace of mind—without the Friday afternoon headache.

Learn more about enterprise Salesforce backup requirements or explore how Salesforce data archiving complements backup strategy for large orgs.

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