It is recommended that you refresh your sandboxes periodically to ensure that you have current configuration information and data. The ability to refresh a sandbox is a wonderful feature, but this guidance leaves a lot of questions unexplained. Periodically? Does that imply that you should do it once a day? Once a week, maybe? Once every three months? When it comes to sandboxes, how often should they be refreshed?
As needed, refresh your developer sandboxes. Developers, for example, can refresh their sandboxes to get a new copy of the organization’s setups and metadata to work with as a baseline and customization. As required or periodically. Again, it’s a little hazy. Let’s dig a little deeper into the salesforce sandbox refresh.
SALESFORCE SANDBOX REFRESH LIMITS
Salesforce limits the number of times sandboxes can be refreshed.
All of your production data is contained in Full Copy sandboxes. As a result, Salesforce places severe limitations on how frequently you may refresh them. You can refresh Full Copy sandboxes once every 29 days. Partial Copy sandboxes have only a little of your production data and so can be refreshed more often. Still, it’s not something you can do daily. Partial Copy sandboxes can be refreshed every 5 days.
You must wait 29 or 5 days to build a new sandbox if you delete a full Full or Partial Copy sandbox.
WHY REFRESH SALESFORCE SANDBOXES?
Sandboxes are one of the most underutilized resources available to any Salesforce development team. Even teams that make good use of sandboxes are prone to forgetting about refreshes. Many Salesforce teams disregard and undervalue sandbox refreshes due to the relatively strict constraints. Because refresh isn’t always available, updating your sandbox isn’t always top of mind, and the significance of refreshing your sandbox regularly is often overlooked.
Salesforce sandbox refreshes are all about bringing your development environments as near to production as feasible, whether they’re Full, Partial Copy, or Dev sandboxes. When you do a sandbox refresh, the data in your sandbox is taken from production to make it as accurate as possible for the sandbox’s category.
HOW TO REFRESH A SALESFORCE SANDBOX
It’s simple to refresh a Salesforce sandbox. Go to Setup >Data Management> Sandboxes to get started. A list of all sandboxes can be found here. A “Refresh” link will appear next to sandboxes that are eligible for a refresh. The sandbox’s state will change to “Copying” when you click the Refresh link. When the refresh is complete, Salesforce will send you an email.
After that, you’ll need to activate your sandbox to take advantage of the changes. The status has now been changed to “Replacement ready.” Simply click “Activate” to make the refreshed sandbox available. Note that once you do this, all data and information in the sandbox will be lost.
SO HOW OFTEN SHOULD I REFRESH MY SANDBOX?
The short answer is as much as possible within Salesforce’s constraints.