Sandbox Management Use Cases

An overview of different types of sandboxes, top use cases for each type, and what is included with each when the sandbox is created or refreshed.

There are 4 types of sandboxes and some are only included in certain Salesforce Editions or purchased for additional cost, please contact your Salesforce Account Executive for details.

Common use cases for each type of sandbox and recommended best practices

Developer - may be refreshed every day, does not include any data automatically but allows 200 MB of data to be imported or created. The most agile and plentiful sandbox type for proof of concept, metadata specific development, or just playgrounds for Developers and Admins to run through potential setup changes to review impact.

Developer Pro - may be refreshed every day, does not include any data automatically but allows 1GB of data to be imported or created. Same idea as Developer but with a higher storage limit for the purpose of creating or loading a subset of records to test newly developed customizations or features that rely on data.

Partial Copy - may be refreshed every 5 days, includes a sample of production data up to 10k parent records and related child records, or 5GB of data total. This sandbox requires a Sandbox Template. A more agile solution than full copies to test specific application areas with selected sample data sets from production.

Full Copy - may be refreshed every 29 days, include a full copy of production data and Sandbox Templates may be used but not required. Typically used for Quality Assurance (QA) and/or User Acceptance Testing (UAT) at the very end of development life cycle before deploying changes to production.