Set Up a Sandbox in Your Salesforce Org
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Understand the different types of sandbox orgs.
- Set up a sandbox in your own Salesforce org.
What is a Sandbox?
A Salesforce sandbox is a place for you to test and build without risk of changing or losing the valuable data in your main, or production, Salesforce org. Sandboxes are the perfect tool for keeping your data clean during training, testing, and development.
No matter the size of your organization and no matter what feature you’re changing or adding, alwaystest changes in a sandbox.
There are four types of sandboxes, each suited for different tasks.
|
Type of Sandbox
|
What’s Included
|
Recommended Uses
|
|---|---|---|
Developer |
All of your production org configurations (including custom objects, fields, and so on), but no production data. Can be refreshed—or pull in the latest configurations from production—once a day. |
Good for development and testing. Because it has all of your settings, you can work with the custom fields, objects, and other settings that are in your production org. But it doesn't have any of your real-world data. |
Developer Pro |
All of your production org configurations, but no production data. Can hold more data than a Developer sandbox. Can be refreshed once a day. |
Good for development and quality assurance tasks, testing, and user training. Better than a Developer sandbox if you’d like to use more sample data in these processes. |
Partial Copy |
All of your production org configurations, plus a sample of your real-world data that you define using a sandbox template. Can be refreshed once every five days. |
Good for user acceptance testing, integration testing, and training, because it contains some of your production data. Seems more like your production org than a Developer or Developer Pro sandbox. |
Full |
A full replica of your production org, including all configurations and all or most of the data. Can be refreshed once every 29 days. |
An ideal testing environment because it is just like production. This is the only type of sandbox that supports performance testing, load testing, and staging. You likely don’t want to use Full sandboxes for development, though, because you can only refresh configurations and data every 29 days, and that refresh can take days to complete. |
The type and quantity of sandboxes you can set up and use depends on your license. If your organization uses the 10 donated licenses through the Power of Us program, you have an Enterprise Edition license. Check out the Sandbox Licenses and Storage Limits by Type page in Salesforce Help to determine how many sandboxes you can create. Talk to your Salesforce account executive if you need more or different sandbox options.
Here’s an example of different sandboxes in action: Gorav Patel, the Salesforce Admin at the nonprofit No More Homelessness (NMH), uses Developer sandboxes when adds new fields, objects, and apps to test them quickly. For releases, he uses his Partial Copy to see how new features interact with a sample of NMH’s existing data.
Now that you understand the different types of sandboxes, visit Create a Sandbox in Salesforce Help and follow the instructions to create one yourself.
Important Sandbox Settings and Notes
After a sandbox is set up, there are a few things you’ll want to check.
First, make sure you’re in your sandbox when you start to work! It'll look like your production org except for the ribbon along the top of the browser window—above global search—letting you know which sandbox you are using.
When you first log in to a new sandbox, check the email deliverability settings. Yes, some sandboxes can be set to generate emails—even to donors and other stakeholders outside your organization!
- From Salesforce Setup, in the Quick Find box, enter
Deliverabilityand select it.
- Make sure that Access level is set to System email only (which only allows automatically generated emails like new user and password reset emails) or No access (which prevents all emails).
- If you want to change the Access level, make your selection and click Save.
System email only is the default deliverability access level on any new Sandbox, so make sure that the setting is correct on older sandboxes if you are new to your organization.
Next, check your NPSP configurations in the NPSP Settings app in your sandbox, especially if you're using a Developer or Developer Pro sandbox. Some settings in NPSP are stored as data and not configurations, so you may not have everything you need. For example, if you use a default General Accounting Unit (GAU), the setting that makes a GAU default will be created in the sandbox. But the GAU record itself—which is data—won't exist in your Developer or Developer Pro sandbox. You must create that GAU record or change your default allocation in NPSP Settings to work with opportunities.
Another important consideration about sandboxes concerns their creation and refresh.
You can think of a sandbox as a snapshot in time of your production org. It’s like a single frame from a movie—while the movie keeps going, you’re pulling out a single image to work from. When you create a new sandbox, it copies all of the configurations and data you specify at that moment, but it doesn’t keep up with changes until you capture another single moment.
To add new configurations and data from production to your sandbox, refresh that sandbox by going to the Sandboxes list in Setup and clicking Refresh next to the sandbox’s name.
But hold up! A refresh gives you a new snapshot of your production org, but it also destroys any of the data or customizations you created in your sandbox since your last refresh. Make sure you don’t overwrite work you were hoping to move to production when you refresh!
Plus, remember to check email deliverability and NPSP settings again with every refresh, because anything you changed since you created or last refreshed your sandbox will be destroyed.
Next, let’s check out three ways to use your sandbox: for training, to test releases, and to make and deploy changes to production.