Data Storage

Owned by Jodie Miners
Last updated: Mar 26, 2015
2 min read

You did know, didn't you, that one record in Salesforce takes up 2kb of your data storage - even if it only has data in one field, or data in hundreds of fields. This doesn't seem too bad until you start getting data that grows exponentially and you wonder where your data storage is being eaten up. Data from Salesforce is !#$ing expensive. Before you rush out and give Salesforce more money, think about how you may be able to reduce data storage. 

A great comment "just like a house it's probably smarter (definitely less expensive) to clean out your closets each spring instead of keep on building new rooms onto the house"

Things that can cause data storage to grow:

  • A related list with tens of records for each primary record you create. 
  • Turning a Multi Select into a related list so that you can report on them (Multi Select Picklists are bad!) 
  • Installing an app that adds thousands of unneeded rows into your Salesforce - eg Mailchimp, but thankfully that have an option to reduce the data now). 
  • Storing each and every email sent (yes, the way Salesforce handles Emails is NOT cool at all. Try using Process Builder to store the email in Chatter rather than as a Task). 
  • Creating thousands of unused tasks - look, people just don't use tasks - in fact they hate them and ignore them - send them a chatter post instead. 
  • Bringing in data from an external system (try looking into the new Lightning Connect - it may not be what you need right now, but it may be in the future). 
  • Person Accounts and NPSP 1 to 1 Account model - but these are necessary usually. 
  • Log records - any form of logging will probably have huge costs associated with it. 

Things you can do to reduce data storage:

  • Delete old Tasks. 
  • Don't use Tasks or Notes - use Chatter. https://help.salesforce.com/HTViewHelpDoc?id=collab_faq_files_do_chatter_posts_and_files.htm&language=en_US
  • Write some code or use a tool like Rollup Helper to summarise the related records on the parent record, then delete the related records - eg after the Case is closed for 12 months. 
  • In extreme cases look at extracting the data into your own databases then bringing it back in with Lightning Connect. 
  • Use Case Comments, Chatter etc that don't take up data storage. 
  • Use Assets - the magic object that does not take up data storage (NOTE: I can not guarantee that this will be the case going forward - especially since Assets is now a full object). 
    • "Active or archived products, price books, price book entries, and assets don’t count against storage"
  • Dedupe your records
  • Don't use Google Docs links - link to files in chatter instead. 
  • Export the related list data to a PDF, attach the PDF to the primary record then delete the related records. 

Technical notes on data storage: