Field Audit Trail

To capture field history data by using Field Audit Trail, first enable Field History Tracking for objects and for specific fields on those objects. When you enable Field History Tracking, changes that occur in tracked fields are recorded in the object’s related history object (for example, when you make changes to an account field, those changes are saved in the AccountHistory object) and these changes appear on the object’s history related list. After you define and deploy a Field Audit Trail policy, Salesforce copies the field history from the object’s history list to the FieldHistoryArchive big object. The first copy takes a long time, because it saves all the field history defined by your policy to the archive storage. Subsequent copies are faster, because they transfer only the changes since the last copy.

The FieldHistoryArchive big object stores all archived field history changes. For each tracked object, you can also define a field history data retention policy in the HistoryRetentionPolicy object that specifies the number of months that you want to retain field history in your system. You can include these policies in both managed and unmanaged packages.

You can define field history retention policies for these objects:

• Accounts, including Person Accounts
• Assets
• Authorization Form Consent
• Campaigns
• Cases
• Communication Subscription Consent
• Contacts
• Contact Point Consent
• Contact Point Type Consent
• Contracts
• Contract Line Items
• Crisis
• Employee
• Employee Crisis Assessment
• Entitlements
• Individuals
• Internal Organization Unit
• Leads
• Net Zero Cloud objects
• Opportunities
• Orders
• Order Products
• Party Consent
• Price Books
• Price Book Entries
• Products
• Service Appointments
• Service Contracts
• Solutions
• Work Orders
• Work Order Line Items
• Custom objects with field history tracking enabled

You can’t track these fields:

• Formula, roll-up summary, or auto-number fields
• Created By and Last Modified By
• The Expected Revenue field on opportunities
• The Master Solution Title or the Master Solution Details fields on solutions
• Long text fields
• Multiselect fields

You use Metadata API to define and deploy your field history retention policy. After you deploy your field history retention policy to a production environment, you can query Field Audit Trail entries stored on the FieldHistoryArchive big object. See Query Batches of Archived Field History Data.

Note When Field Audit Trail is turned on, Salesforce relates HistoryRetentionPolicy automatically to the supported objects. By default, Salesforce archives data after 18 months in production and after one month in sandboxes, and stores all archived data until you delete it. Salesforce doesn’t include the default retention policy when you retrieve the object’s definition through Metadata API. Salesforce retrieves only custom retention policies with the object definition.

When you delete field history archive data, use REST API, SOAP API, or Tooling API. If you delete a record in your production data, the delete cascades to the related history tracking records, but Salesforce doesn’t delete the history copied into the FieldHistoryArchive big object. For information about deleting data in FieldHistoryArchive, see Delete Field History and Field Audit Trail Data.

For information about enabling Field Audit Trail, contact your Salesforce representative.

Tip If you turn on Platform Encryption, previously archived data remains unencrypted. For example, let's say that your organization uses Field Audit Trail to define a data history retention policy for an account field, such as the phone number field. After you turn on Platform Encryption, Salesforce encrypts the phone number data in the account, as well as new phone number records and previous updates stored in the Account History related list. But phone number history data that's already archived in the FieldHistoryArchive big object remains stored without encryption. To encrypt previously archived data, contact Salesforce to encrypt and rearchive the stored field history data, and then delete the unencrypted archive.