Take Snapshot

This articles discusses the defaults and gives you some useful tips and tricks when creating a metadata backup.

Defaults

When you take a metadata backup, the following assets are selected by default:

1. Unpackaged only (no managed packages)
2. Profiles
3. Custom Objects
4. Page Layouts
5. Apex Classes
6. Apex Pages (VisualForce Pages, not Lightning FlexiPages)
7. Apex Components
8. Apex Triggers
9. Global Value Sets
10. Standard Value Sets
11. Workflows

Additionally, the following settings are pre-selected for you:

1. Load Package Customizations 
2. Display Package Customizations
3. Load Extra Object Information

These enable Snapshot to grab additional information about customizations to managed packages and standard objects.

You might want to customize these selections if you want more metadata.

Tips and Tricks

The defaults are set to help a new user get started with an Org of their choice. Here are the tips and tricks to change the settings to your particular needs.

Settings tab

1. If you already have a package.xml created and prefer to use that to set your limits, use the Select Assets With File option to load your package.xml and then use the Take Snapshot button to create your metadata backup.
2. To grab the customizations to your managed packages, use the Load Package Customizations and the Display Package Customizations checkboxes. These give you the flexibility to display/ select changes to individual metadata assets and then grab them once selected. Without these, you will not be able to grab customizations to your managed packages as the Load Selected Packages checkbox downloads only the original (uncustomized) managed package.
3. If you have a large Org, please use the Display Number of Selected Assets and Display Number of Folder Assets. This will count all the metadata assets selected and is displayed on the title bar. The current limit for a retrieve is 10,000 assets. If your needs exceed this limit, please use the Asset Groups to workaround the issue. Asset Groups can be manipulated in the Take Snapshot tab (slide the bottom slider up and add/ remove groups).

Main Assets

1. Profiles act as a junction object. In other words, if you select say the Admin profile and Account object, then all you are getting as part of the Admin profile is the Object Permissions, Field Permissions, Record Type Visibility etc for the Account object. The same for other objects like Contact, Opportunity etc are missing in the retrieved metadata. The way around this is to select all Objects (for Object Permissions, Field Permissions, Record Type Visibility), Apex Classes (for Apex Class Access), Apex Pages (for Apex Page Access), Custom Tabs (for Tab Visibility), Custom Applications (for Application Visibility) to fetch a complete Profile.
2. Custom Objects can be easily narrowed down further by right clicking the list to select standard or custom or managed or unmanaged etc.

Take Snapshot

1. The default metadata backup created by Snapshot is a single file that contains all the metadata downloaded from Salesforce in a gzip compressed and base64 encoded format. If you prefer to have these file in the Force.com IDE (Eclipse) format (hierarchy of folders with each metadata asset represented as a single file), you can do that by changing the top left dropdown to Store Reference to Data. You might also like this format better if you intend to hack the metadata manually and then let Snapshot migrate the results.
2. If you have a large Org and need to grab everything in a single backup for compliance or documentation purposes, Create Asset Groups is your friend. Slide the bottom slider up to display the Create Asset Groups and create groups of metadata that are individually retrieved. The retrieved metadata will automatically be stitched together to create one metadata backup by Snapshot. See how to get started below.