Salesforce Data Migration Best Practices: How to Plan, Execute, and Validate a Data Import or Update

Step 1 – Identify the Data You Want to Migrate

Determine which Salesforce Objects you need to migrate. Consider the scope carefully:

• Will you migrate only Contact information from each Account, or all Account data?
• Are you migrating data from a specific division or business unit only?

Start with a clear inventory of the objects and fields in scope.

Step 2 – Create Templates for Each Object

1. Use Data Loader's Export feature to generate a template for each target object. The export file structure matches the object's field schema.
2. Identify required fields for each object, since some objects have mandatory relationships that dictate migration order. See Considerations for Relationships.

Migration Order Rule: Always migrate objects in dependency order. Example: Users → Accounts → Opportunities.

Step 3 – Populate Your Templates

• Review your source data carefully before loading it into the template.
• Best practice: Load one record first, verify the result in Salesforce, then load all records.

Step 4 – Prepare the Destination Org

• Create custom fields to store legacy IDs from your source system. This helps maintain relationships and supports data validation reporting. See Create Custom Fields.
• Optionally, mark the custom field as an External ID to index it. This enables upsert operations in Data Loader and helps prevent duplicates. See Can I import using external IDs?
• Create additional custom fields for any non-standard fields from your source org (for example, if your old org stored "Home Phone" for users, create that field in the new org).

Step 5 – Validate the Migrated Data

After completing the migration, validate the results using these techniques:

• Custom Reports: Build reports to compare record counts between your source and destination. See Build a Report in Lightning Experience.
• Spot Checks: Manually open and compare a sample of migrated records against source data.
• Exception Reports: Review Data Loader error logs and exception reports to identify records that failed to migrate.