How to Set Up Automated Daily Backups for Your Keap Contact Database

In the fast-paced world of B2B operations, your Keap contact database is more than just a list of names; it’s the lifeblood of your sales, marketing, and client relationship efforts. Losing this critical data—whether due to human error, system malfunction, or malicious activity—can bring your business to a grinding halt, costing you time, revenue, and reputation. Proactive data protection isn’t just a best practice; it’s a strategic imperative. This guide provides a clear, actionable roadmap for establishing automated daily backups for your Keap contact database, ensuring your vital information is always secure and recoverable, giving you peace of mind and operational resilience.

Step 1: Assess Your Backup Needs and Strategy

Before diving into the technical setup, take a moment to define what “success” looks like for your Keap backups. Consider which specific data points are absolutely critical for your business – beyond just basic contact information, this might include custom fields, tags, notes, and activity history. Determine your desired backup frequency (daily is often ideal for active databases) and retention policy. How long do you need to keep past backups? Where will these backups be stored to ensure both security and easy access for restoration? A clear strategy here will guide your choice of tools and the design of your automation workflow, preventing wasted effort on backing up irrelevant data or storing it in an unrecoverable format.

Step 2: Select Your Automated Backup Platform

While Keap offers some export functionality, true daily automation requires an external platform. We advocate for low-code integration platforms like Make.com (formerly Integromat) for their robust capabilities and flexibility. These platforms act as a bridge, allowing Keap to communicate with various cloud storage solutions. Alternatively, dedicated CRM backup services exist, but often come with less customization. Evaluate platforms based on their ease of Keap integration, the variety of storage connectors available (e.g., Google Drive, Dropbox, SFTP), pricing, and reliability. The goal is to choose a platform that provides a stable, secure, and scalable foundation for your automated backup routine, minimizing ongoing manual intervention.

Step 3: Establish the Keap API Connection

The next critical step is to securely connect your chosen backup platform to your Keap account via its API. This typically involves generating an API key or an OAuth token within your Keap application. For platforms like Make.com, you’ll add a Keap module and follow prompts to authenticate, granting the platform permission to access and extract your contact data. It’s crucial to use an account with appropriate permissions to avoid any data access limitations. Always follow best practices for API key management, such as storing them securely and rotating them periodically if your platform allows. A properly configured API connection is the conduit through which your contact data will flow, making this step foundational to the entire process.

Step 4: Design the Data Extraction Workflow

With the connection established, you’ll design the actual workflow for extracting data. In your automation platform, set up a daily scheduled trigger. The primary action will be to “List Contacts” or “Search Contacts” from Keap, ensuring you retrieve all relevant contact records. Consider filters for recently updated contacts if you’re looking to optimize performance, but for a full daily backup, extracting all active contacts is usually preferred. Map out which specific fields—including standard contact details, custom fields, tags, and associated notes—are essential for a complete recovery. The more comprehensive your extraction, the more robust your backup will be, ensuring no critical information is overlooked in a crisis.

Step 5: Implement Data Formatting and Cloud Storage

Once the data is extracted from Keap, it needs to be formatted and stored in a usable way. Most automation platforms allow you to transform the raw Keap data (often in JSON format) into a more universally accessible format like CSV. This makes it easy to open and review in a spreadsheet program if needed. Following formatting, connect a module to your chosen cloud storage service (e.g., Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Amazon S3, or an SFTP server). Configure the module to create a new file daily with a timestamped filename (e.g., Keap_Contacts_2023-10-27.csv) to maintain a clear version history. This step ensures your data is not only backed up but also organized and readily available for future access or restoration.

Step 6: Schedule, Test, and Monitor Your Automation

After building the workflow, schedule it to run daily at a non-peak hour, ensuring minimal impact on your Keap usage. This is where automation truly shines, removing the need for manual intervention. Immediately after scheduling, rigorously test the entire workflow. Run it manually a few times, then check your cloud storage to verify that the files are being created correctly, contain the expected data, and are properly formatted. Set up notifications within your automation platform to alert you to any failures or errors. Regular monitoring, even for an automated process, is key to catching potential issues early and ensuring your Keap contact database remains consistently backed up and protected.

Step 7: Develop a Data Recovery Protocol

A backup is only as good as its recovery plan. While automated daily backups safeguard your data, you must also know how to restore it efficiently should a disaster strike. Document a clear, step-by-step recovery protocol. This should outline who is responsible for initiating a restore, where the backup files are located, how to import them back into Keap (or a new CRM), and any data deduplication or merging strategies required. Regularly review and, if possible, simulate your recovery process. Having a well-defined recovery protocol in place provides true business continuity, transforming your daily backups from a passive insurance policy into an active component of your operational resilience strategy.

If you would like to read more, we recommend this article: Keap Data Recovery: The 5-Step Checklist for HR & Recruiting Firms