Salesforce Sandbox Types And How To Choose The Right One

Every Salesforce team has a story that starts with “it was just a small change in production”.

A well chosen Salesforce sandbox is how that story never gets a sequel. Here is which sandbox type fits which job, how often to refresh it, and the one habit that gives you early access to every new release.

What is a Salesforce sandbox

A Salesforce sandbox is an isolated copy of your org's metadata, and sometimes its data, used to build and test changes without touching production. Each sandbox has its own login, its own users and its own storage, so a broken flow or a bad data load stays inside the sandbox instead of reaching customers.

Salesforce offers four types. They differ in how much data they hold, whether they copy data at all, and how often you can refresh them.

The four Salesforce sandbox types compared

Your edition decides how many you get. Professional Edition includes 10 Developer sandboxes. Enterprise Edition includes 25 Developer sandboxes and one Partial Copy. Unlimited and Performance include 100 Developer, five Developer Pro, one Partial Copy and one Full sandbox. Extra sandboxes can be bought, including Partial Copy and Full for Enterprise and above.

Which sandbox for which job

• Building a flow or a component. A Developer sandbox. It is fast to create, refreshes daily and keeps each person's work separate
• Testing an integration. A Developer Pro or Partial Copy sandbox, so the integration has real looking records to read and write
• User training. A Partial Copy sandbox with a template that pulls realistic accounts and cases, so people practise on familiar data
• User acceptance testing before go live. A Partial Copy for most projects, or a Full sandbox when the change touches large data volumes
• Performance and load testing. A Full sandbox only, because nothing else holds production sized data

How to create and refresh a sandbox

1. In Setup, open Sandboxes and click New Sandbox
2. Give it a short name, since it becomes part of every username, for example uat or dev1
3. Pick the type, and for Partial Copy choose or create a sandbox template that lists the objects to copy
4. Optionally add an Apex class to run after copy, which can mask data or reset settings automatically
5. Start the copy. Developer sandboxes are often ready within the hour, while a Full sandbox for a large org can take a day or more

To refresh, click Refresh next to an existing sandbox once its interval has passed. A refresh replaces everything in the sandbox, so make sure nobody has unfinished work in it.

After a copy or refresh, Salesforce adds the sandbox name to every username and adds .invalid to user email addresses, so test emails do not reach real people. Integration credentials and scheduled jobs usually need attention too, which is why the checklist below matters.

Preview sandboxes and seasonal releases

Salesforce ships three releases a year, and sandboxes upgrade before production. Sandboxes on preview instances get the new release several weeks early, while non preview sandboxes upgrade together with production.

Whether a sandbox lands on a preview instance depends on its instance, and Salesforce publishes a sandbox preview guide before each release with the dates by which to refresh. Keeping at least one sandbox on preview gives your team a few weeks to test flows, integrations and release updates on the new version before users see it. That is the habit that turns every release weekend into a non event.

Post refresh checklist

Common questions

Sandboxes are one half of a calm release, and the other half is a process your team follows every time. If you want help setting one up, our release management support covers it, and a Salesforce health check shows where your current setup carries risk. For a quick self review, try our 30 point health check checklist.