If you are weighing SaaS backup alternatives, you are probably really asking a bigger question: does the way you protect servers and virtual machines also cover the work that lives in Jira, GitHub, Shopify and the other SaaS apps your teams open every morning? Often it does not, and the gap is easy to miss until something gets deleted. The market is starting to notice: according to Gartner, 15% of enterprises prioritized SaaS backup in 2024; Gartner forecasts 75% will by 2028. This guide shows you how to compare your options, which questions to ask, and where a dedicated SaaS resilience platform fits.
In this guide
- What should you look for in SaaS backup alternatives?
- Why do teams look beyond their current approach?
- How do you compare SaaS backup alternatives?
- What does a SaaS resilience platform do differently?
- What can restore not do?
- What else do people ask about SaaS backup?
- Where should you start?
Key takeaways
- Approaches built around servers and virtual machines and approaches built around SaaS apps solve different problems. Match the approach to where your data lives.
- Define a recovery time objective (RTO) for each SaaS app before you compare anything else.
- Ask how deep restore goes: a whole account, a project, or a single item.
- Be honest about limits. Restore brings back backed-up data, not everything that happened around it.
What should you look for in SaaS backup alternatives?
Look for a platform built around the apps you actually run, with restore that works at the level of the thing you lost.
Most backup approaches grew up around a particular kind of workload. Some are designed around physical servers and virtual machines. Others focus on multi-cloud infrastructure or on consolidating file shares and object storage. A newer category, the SaaS resilience platform, is built to connect to your SaaS apps and keep a recoverable copy of the data inside them: your repositories, work items, boards, product catalogs and ledgers.
None of these categories is wrong. They answer different questions, which is why a side-by-side feature chart can be misleading. The useful comparison starts with your own environment.
| Approach | Built around | Question to ask |
|---|---|---|
| Infrastructure-focused platforms | Servers, virtual machines, storage | Does it connect to the SaaS apps we use, and to what depth? |
| Hybrid and multi-cloud platforms | Workloads spread across clouds and data centers | Can we restore one item, or only a whole workload? |
| Native exports | One-off downloads from an app | Who runs them, how often, and how do we put the data back? |
| SaaS resilience platform | The data inside specific SaaS apps | Does it cover every app that matters to us? |
Many teams end up using more than one approach: one for infrastructure, one for SaaS. The goal is not to find a single winner. It is to make sure nothing important sits in the gap between them.
Why do teams look beyond their current approach?
Because SaaS data sits outside the servers and virtual machines most backup approaches were designed for, and recovery targets for it are often undefined.
Think of it like insuring your house carefully while the contents of a storage unit across town go uncovered. The storage unit holds things you would miss badly, and nobody remembers it until the lock is cut.
The numbers in the Rewind SaaS Resilience Report, Q4 2025 (based on a Q4 2025 survey of IT, Cloud Ops, and Engineering leaders at companies with 500-10,000+ employees) show how common that gap is:
- 60% of respondents experienced at least one Jira outage in the past year.
- 73% of organizations report Jira outages directly impact delivery timelines.
- 69% of organizations require Jira recovery within 1-4 hours.
- Only 40% have a defined RTO for Jira, and only 29% for Confluence.
- 50% of enterprises with 10,000+ employees and a 1-4 hour recovery mandate have NO solution in place.
Read those together. Teams need fast recovery, and many have not written down what fast means or checked that anything can deliver it.
Outages are also hard to catch early. Splunk (The Hidden Costs of Downtime) reports that 41% of technology executives say customers are often or always the first to detect downtime. And the bills are real: 54% of organizations report their most recent significant outage cost more than $100,000; 20% report more than $1 million (Uptime Institute, 2025 Annual Outage Analysis).
There is also a human cost. Nobody forgets the moment a colleague says, “I think I deleted the wrong project,” and the room goes quiet. Add the fact that your teams are adopting more automations and AI agents, so more changes land in your SaaS apps than any person reviews, and the case for having a recoverable copy gets stronger.
How do you compare SaaS backup alternatives?
Use a short checklist that tests integration, recovery targets, restore depth and security, then try the answers against a real incident from your own history.
Here is a practical checklist you can take into any vendor conversation:
- Does it cover our apps? List every SaaS app your teams depend on and check each one by name. Coverage that says “SaaS” in general is not the same as coverage for your tools.
- What is our RTO for each app? Write down how long you can live without Jira, your storefront or your repositories. Then ask how the platform helps you meet it.
- What is our recovery point? Ask how often backups run and whether any resources are backed up in real time. The gap between backups is the work you could lose.
- How granular is restore? Can you bring back a single item, or only everything? Ask for specifics per app, because depth varies by platform.
- Can we see what changed? Version comparison helps you decide what to restore and what to leave alone.
- Can we take a backup before a risky change? Before a migration, a bulk import or a big automation run, an on-demand backup is a useful habit.
- What security attestations are in place? Ask for independent attestations rather than a list of adjectives. Check the scope of each one.
- Is pricing clear as we grow? Ask what drives cost (users, apps, data volume) and what happens when you add a new app.
Then run the test that matters. Pick a real incident your team has had, such as a deleted repository, a mangled bulk edit or a lost board, and ask each option to walk you through the recovery step by step.
What does a SaaS resilience platform do differently?
It focuses on the data inside your SaaS apps: it backs that data up automatically, lets you see what changed, and helps you restore the specific thing you lost.
Rewind is a SaaS resilience platform. It is generally available for Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, GitHub, Azure DevOps, Miro, Shopify, BigCommerce, Klaviyo, Mailchimp, monday.com, Trello and QuickBooks Online, with Okta and Microsoft Entra ID in early access. More than 25,000 organizations worldwide trust Rewind, across over 7 PB of data. Rewind holds SOC 2 Type II and ISO/IEC 27001:2022.
Here is how that maps to the checklist above:
- Automated daily backups. Backups run on their own, and some resources on some platforms, such as Shopify products and orders, are backed up in real time.
- Backup Now with Bookmarking. Before a risky change or migration, you can take an immediate backup and name the run so you can find it later.
- Point-in-time restore. Choose the moment you want to go back to, rather than accepting whatever state the app is in today.
- Item-level restore. On most platforms you can restore a single item rather than everything. The exception is Trello, where restore is for a whole board. Restore is not available for Bitbucket.
- Version comparison. See what changed and when, so you can restore with confidence. It shows the changes, not who made them.
In practice, that looks like this. If someone deletes a repository, you can restore a deleted repo in a few clicks. If a Jira epic goes missing, restore the epic and the work items inside it come back with it. If a bulk edit scrambles your Shopify catalog, point-in-time restore helps you return products to an earlier state. Shopify merchants on the Protection Suite also get Rewind Alerts: email alerts for bulk product changes when they pass a percentage threshold you set within 24 hours.
You do not need to treat this as a replacement for everything else you run. For many teams, it is the piece that covers the SaaS apps their other approaches were never designed around.
What can restore not do?
Restore brings back data that was backed up. It cannot undo events that happened outside that data.
Being clear about this up front saves you a bad surprise later:
- Restore does not reverse payments, sent emails or anything else that happened outside the backed-up data.
- Version comparison tells you what changed and when, not who changed it.
- Restore depth varies by platform. Check the specifics for each app you use.
- Recovery time depends on how much you are restoring, so plan your RTO around real tests, not assumptions.
No platform replaces good habits. Limit who can run bulk changes, name a backup before big migrations, and rehearse a restore before you need one. A fire drill feels like a chore until the day it is not.
What else do people ask about SaaS backup?
How is SaaS backup different from traditional backup?
Traditional approaches are typically built around servers, virtual machines and storage. SaaS backup connects to your cloud apps and keeps a recoverable copy of the data inside them, such as repositories, work items, boards and store catalogs, so you can restore at the level of the item you lost.
Do I need to replace my current backup approach?
Not necessarily. Many teams keep an infrastructure-focused approach for servers and add a SaaS resilience platform for the apps it does not cover. Start by listing your SaaS apps and checking whether each one has a defined recovery target and a tested way to restore.
Doesn’t my SaaS vendor already back up my data?
SaaS vendors run and maintain their platforms, but you are generally responsible for your own data inside them. Read your vendor agreement carefully, and ask whether you could restore a single deleted item to an earlier point in time.
How often does Rewind back up my data?
Rewind runs automated daily backups. Some resources on some platforms, such as Shopify products and orders, are backed up in real time. You can also use Backup Now to take an immediate backup before a risky change.
Where should you start?
Start with a list of your SaaS apps and an RTO for each one.
Comparing SaaS backup alternatives gets much easier once you know what you are protecting and how quickly you need it back. Walk through the checklist, test a real incident, and be clear about what restore can and cannot do. Then fill the gaps. A recoverable copy is cheap compared with a lost week.
Want to talk through your own setup? Talk to an expert and we will help you map your SaaS apps to recovery targets. And if you like practical resilience ideas in your inbox, Subscribe to Retro, our monthly newsletter.
Which SaaS app would hurt most to lose for a day, and what would your first move be? Share it with us.
