What is a Salesforce Sandbox?
What is a sandbox and why do I need it?
Imagine a Salesforce sandbox as your virtual playground for testing and experimenting, without messing up the real-deal (aka, Production) Salesforce environment. It's like a clone of your Salesforce setup where you can try out new configurations, play with data, and test out those game-changing customizations. Whether you're fine-tuning workflows, testing new apps, or just making sure everything works smoothly before rolling it out, the sandbox is your safe haven. It is ok to break things here. If you are going to break anything in the Salesforce world, this is where you do it. It's where you get to be the mad scientist of Salesforce without any real-world consequences. Perfect for ensuring that when you make changes, they're polished and ready for prime time in the actual Salesforce universe. Remember you do NOT want to break Production, yes that would be bad. Does that do, do not tend to have long careers in IT. Don't be this person.
Sandbox Types:
- Developer Sandbox - Intended for development and testing purposes in an isolated non production environment. This type of sandbox includes the source org's metadata. It provides 200MB of storage capacity.
- Developer Pro Sandbox - Intended for development and testing purposes, like the Developer sandbox. The main difference is the larger storage capacity. It provides 1GB of storage capacity.
- Partial Copy - Intended to be used for Quality Assurance testing (QA), User Acceptance Testing (UAT), Integration Testing, or even as a training environment. Includes a copy of your Production org's configuration (aka metadata), and a sample of the org's data. It also provides 5GB of storage capacity.
- Full Copy - Intended to be used as a testing environment. This type of sandbox supports performance and load testing. Additionally, these types of sandboxes are a replica of your Production org, meaning that all data, and metadata is copied over. The storage capacity is the same as your Production org.
Key terms
Metadata - Salesforce configuration data, i.e. fields, layouts, profiles, and automations.
Refresh Interval - How often you can update the sandbox from the source.
- Developer - 1 day
- Developer Pro - 1 day
- Partial Copy - 5 days
- Full Copy - 29 days
Steps for Creating a Salesforce sandbox (Step by Step Slide Deck)
Video Tutorial