Salesforce Sandbox Types and Management Best Practices

The following describes the four Salesforce sandbox types, their storage limits, refresh cycles, and recommended use cases to help you choose the right sandbox for your needs. 
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.

Sandbox Delivers Real Business Benefits

When you create a separate environment for:

• Developing
• Testing
• Training

You enable:

• More stability for your active organization
• Shortened cycle times for testing and trials
• Realistic training environment

• Reduce Operational Risk

• By minimizing disruptions to your active organizations and your operations

• Raise productivity

• Developers spend less time working around the constraints of production organization.
• Users trained in a real-world environment transition seamlessly to production organization.

• Increase efficiency

• Tests and trials of new apps, new release features, configuration changes, can be seamlessly handed off to QA and then production organization.

• Higher User Satisfaction

• Better application quality, fewer disruptions and training lead to more satisfied users of Salesforce

Best practice sandbox management includes not refreshing or cloning many sandboxes at one time. It will appear that they are all processing without progress. However, they are processed in series (one at a time) and not parallel so it can make them appear that they are taking much longer than normal if there is only a single sandbox being cloned or refreshed. This is discussed in more detail in the Status and time to complete a sandbox copy or refresh article.