Salesforce Sandboxes: What They Are and How to Use Them

Salesforce has helped several businesses in effectively managing their client databases. The software is frequently utilized by sales teams from companies of all sizes to make use of their massive and sophisticated customer databases. 

Here in this article, we will share the information about salesforce sandboxes and when to make salesforce partial sandbox refresh. 

What are salesforce sandboxes?

Salesforce provides sandboxes as a “safe zone” for testing and training, as well as experimenting with different settings, new apps, or significant modifications to your setup. It allows you to duplicate your production environment for testing, training, and development purposes.

Creating a Salesforce Sandbox allows you to experiment with new features without having to worry about them harming your live organization. Although the two may appear to be comparable, a sandbox is a clone or copy of your production environment as it was on the date the sandbox was established, rather than a data backup.

How Do I Use a Salesforce Sandbox?

Generally, there are 4 types of salesforce sandboxes. Each one has its purpose. Below we have listed different types and their uses:-

1. Developer Sandbox

The Developer Sandbox is the most basic sort of testing environment. Most Salesforce licenses include these, which let you build a testing environment with a copy of your Production Metadata.

Developer Sandboxes can be refreshed once a day and have a 200MB data and file storage limit.

2. Developer Pro Sandbox

Developer Pro Sandboxes are fairly similar to ordinary Developer settings, however, they have a bit more storage. They give you 1GB of data storage and 1GB of file storage. The one-day refresh limit remains unchanged.

Salesforce Developer Pro Sandboxes are only included with the Unlimited and Performance editions, however, they can be purchased individually.

3. Partial Copy Sandbox

This is the first Sandbox that allows you to transfer metadata as well as a portion of your data. A Sandbox Template allows you to select a sample collection of data, as the name implies. This Sandbox is highly useful if you want to test new functionality on live data or train users in a test environment using live data.

The Partial Copy Sandbox features a 5-day refresh cycle and supports data storage of up to 5GB, as well as file storage that is identical to your production Org.

4. Full Sandbox

Full sandbox environments are exact copies of your production organization and all of its data, including standard and custom object records, documents, attachments, code, and settings, among other things. Full Sandboxes have a 29-day refresh cycle.

Use of Salesforce Sandboxes

Sandboxes are used by developers for staging, performance testing, UAT, SIT, training, and other purposes as part of their development process. When combined with scratch orgs and Salesforce DX’s source-driven development, these help developers be more productive during the development process.