In Salesforce.com we have four Different Salesforce Sandbox types. It is very useful to understand the advantages and disadvantages of each Salesforce Sandbox type. Different Salesforce Sandbox types are
- Full Sandbox.
- Partial Data Sandbox.
- Developer Sandbox and
- Developer Pro Sandbox.
Salesforce Sandbox is a snapshot of your production environment on the date you create or refresh it. A Sandbox instance is created in a separate environment for a variety of purposes such as development, testing, and training, without affecting the data and configurations in your Salesforce production instance.
Different Salesforce Sandbox types
Full Sandbox Salesforce
A Full Salesforce Sandbox includes all of the metadata and data from your production org. All object records, custom setting records, and the like will be available in your Full sandbox. This would, for example, include all of the Case records created in your production environment as part of your customer support department. Likewise, all Opportunities created by your Sales team would be copied to the sandbox. A few additional options are also made available:
- Field history: You have the option of copying a configurable amount of field history data from production.
- Chatter data: You can include the Chatter posts and activity from production if desired.
There are two primary considerations you’ll want to make when setting up these options:
- First, do you have concerns about file storage limits in your sandbox? If so, consider avoiding inclusion of Chatter data. Field History data does not count against your data storage limits.
- Second, are you looking to provision the sandbox as quickly as possible? If so, avoid copying any field history or Chatter data. Overlooking these items will expedite the provisioning time of a Full sandbox.
As a standard, production orgs are provided with one Full sandbox available for use. As a result, the application of a Full Salesforce sandbox must be thoughtful and strategic. In Sandbox mainly three activities will occur they are development, testing, and training.
- Full sandbox would be much more useful for testing or training than for development.
- Data volume is more often a dependency for test execution and training than it is for development.
Partial Data Sandbox Salesforce
Partial Data Salesforce sandboxes are very similar to Full sandboxes except that they only allow a subset of data to be copied to the sandbox from production. Salesforce.com offers a “sandbox copy engine” that assists with the selection of data to be copied. Up to 10,000 records of each selected object will be included in the copy. Additionally, file and data storage limit is 5 GB.
Note Each Salesforce sandbox type has a different limit for file and data storage. Object records count against data storage; content, files, and Chatter feeds count against file storage.
Developer and Developer Pro Sandboxes
Developer and Developer Pro sandboxes include no data from production and they only consist of metadata. This is often sufficient for testing needs. If additional data is needed, you can manually create it via the UI (as a production user would) or load in a set of data via Data Loader. If you needed a smaller set of data, there’s really no need to provision a Full or Partial Data sandbox.
Example :- let’s say you need a sample of Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, Cases, and Leads; you can create files of 10–100 records for each quickly with relative ease.
The only differences between Developer and Developer Pro sandboxes are the limits for file and data storage. A Developer sandbox can hold up to 200 megabytes of each, while a Developer Pro sandbox can hold up to 1 gigabyte of each.
| Sandbox Type | Refresh Interval | Storage Limit | What’s Copies | Sandbox Template |
| Developer Sandbox | 1 day | Data Storage : 200 MB
File Storage : 200 Mb | Metadata only | Not Available |
| Developer Pro Sandbox | 1 day | Data Storage : 1 GB
File Storage : 1 GB | Metadata only | Not Available |
| Partial Copy Sandbox | 5 days | Data Storage : 5 GB
File Storage : 5 GB | Metadata and Sample data | Required |
| Full Sandbox | 29 days | Same as Production Org. | Metadata and all data | Available |
Conclusion : In this Salesforce Tutorial, we have learned about Different Salesforce Sandbox types and it’s features. In our upcoming Salesforce tutorial, we will learn about refreshing Salesforce Sandbox.