Ran Out of Data Storage in Salesforce? Do So Much More With Data Archiving

“Hey, Jimmy boy! Long time no see, what’s cooking these days?”, piped Antony, as he neared Jim’s desk.

“Oh hey, Antony. Work’s been, well…now how to put it delicately, it’s not been going good.”, replied Jim. Jim is the Salesforce admin in a leading financial firm, XYZ Fintech. Since morning, he had been staring at this system, looking rather confused, & shuffling from department to department. “I have seemed to encounter a rather peculiar issue with our Salesforce CRM. Apparently, it’s run out of data storage space.”, he continued.

“So what’s the matter? Just delete some of the old data we don’t use anymore & you will have space for new data. Problem solved!”, said Antony, looking rather pleased with having solved Jim’s big problem.

“If only it were that simple. Since morning I have been going around asking different teams if there are any old records I can delete but to no avail. Everyone here wants to keep their data. They give me reasons like audit concerns, compliance guidelines, retention requirements, & whatnot. But then what do I do? How do I resolve my issue?”, Jim replied, still furiously staring at this screen.

“Umm, what about more storage space? Does Salesforce give out additional data storage, in case companies run out of the primary one?”, countered Antony.

“Yes, it does. But that’s like a very costly option, like a really expensive one! Can’t imagine the finance team releasing that much funds every month to make this payment. I will have to come up with some other solution.”, said Jim, dejectedly.

This is not just the issue with Jim, every day many Salesforce users encounter the issue of having their Salesforce data storage limit exceeded. Though some of them simply delete their old data or purchase additional data storage from Salesforce, as Antony suggested, more than 90% of them aren’t at liberty to do either of these things. Then what options are they left with? Well, this article is a beacon for all those users.

In today’s digital times, the growth & future of Salesforce-using organizations are highly dependent on their policy to collect, store, retain, access, and use their data. But this enormous volume of data comes with its own set of challenges like high data storage costs, reduced application performance, quality issues, & security and scalability. Due to this, users need to come up with proper ways to manage this data volume while staying within the data storage limits set by Salesforce.

What happens when Salesforce data storage limit is reached?

Believe us, even we don’t want to go over this traumatic topic again. But we have this moral obligation to forewarn other Salesforce users who are blissfully unaware of this looming adversity. When users suddenly reach the Salesforce Data Storage limit in their Org, Salesforce sends an email to their admin informing them that they must either:

Delete data from their instance to clean it up, or
Purchase more Salesforce Data Storage

The only saving grace is that Salesforce doesn’t immediately stop users from inserting new data when the data storage reaches 100%. Instead, it allows users to continue using their applications & create/update data up to a grace limit (usually around 110%). but once that grace limit is breached, users will no longer be able to update their records & processes will break down if nothing is done to rectify the data storage issue.

Also read: 5 Mistakes to Avoid Related to Data Storage in Salesforce

What to do if you run out of data storage in Salesforce?

With the most common options of purging the old Salesforce data (either manually or using tools like Salesforce Data Loader, Salesforce’s Mass Delete Wizard, Task Archiver, etc) and purchasing additional Salesforce data storage (or upgrading the Salesforce edition) already out of the way, let’s discuss some of the other things users can do in case they run out of data storage.

ARCHIVING! DATA ARCHIVING! SALESFORCE DATA ARCHIVING!

This is literally the only option users are left with when they don’t want to delete data or purchase more storage but still want to avoid hitting their Salesforce data storage limits. And it’s fair enough too. Through long-term data archiving, users can easily take out their old, inactive data from Salesforce’s primary data storage and archive/store it in some low-cost, reliable secondary storage space. This drastically reduces data storage expenditure, improves performance, and boosts user experience.

Why should you archive data in Salesforce?

Now that we have already established that data archiving is essential if you want to rise above the limitations of the Salesforce data storage, let’s understand what some of the benefits of implementing an effective data archival strategy are:

Better Performance– Since large data volumes can result in slower query performance & impact user experience, archiving is an optimal way to retain only relevant data in the system & enable better performance of different Salesforce components like ListViews, Search, Reports, Queries, etc
Reduced Storage Costs– After archiving the production data, the storage space is only used for storing the relevant data while all non-relevant data is archived, allowing the storage space to be reused & bringing down the data storage costs.
Enhanced User Experience– Through efficient data archiving, unwanted data can be easily removed from the live instance which reduces clutter for Org users and drives better adoption.
Easier Compliance– Data archiving also helps enterprises, from the industries that are governed by various compliance guidelines (like HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA, etc) & need to adhere to pre-defined data retention policies, meet their requirements by letting them retain data for longer periods without worrying about storage or costs.
Better Data Backups– In a way, data archiving also keeps the Salesforce data safe by ensuring that the data backup processes run more smoothly with the legacy data safely out of the way & only relevant data getting backed up.

Now let’s go back & see whether our Salesforce admin, Jim reached this conclusion or not.

“Found out something or you still stuck?”, asked Antony as he swung by Jim’s desk in the evening.

“Yes, I found out about this thing called data archiving. It’s amazing and pretty easy too. This might just solve all my problems.”, replied Jim, looking visibly relaxed than before. “And look, I even found this incredible application on the AppExchange, DataArchiva. They will allow me to archive all the old data into Big Objects storage which is even better because at least I wouldn’t prefer moving such sensitive data into any cloud storage. I’m going to set up a meeting with their team right away to discuss the matter at hand.”, he continued.

Also read: DataArchiva: Your Salesforce Customer 360 Enabler

“Good for you man. At least you can relax now! Do tell me also how the meeting goes.”, said Antony as he bid goodbye to Jim.

So that’s a happy ending right there! Jim was lucky, he researched around & found out about data archiving as a means for solving his issues with the data storage limits. He even landed upon our data archiving solution, DataArchiva which, as you saw, further met his needs. If you too want to be lucky like him, you too should adopt an efficient & effective data archival strategy in your system as soon as possible.

Something about our Salesforce Data Archival Platform

To help customers looking for an efficient data archival strategy for their Org, we offer them our highly advanced Salesforce data archival platform (consisting of DataArchiva). While DataArchiva is a one-of-its-kind, native data archiving solution that intelligently archives Salesforce data into Big Objects, DataArchiva External Archiving application extends its archiving capabilities further with an option to archive data into external databases (Postgres, Redshift, MSSQL, MySQL, Oracle) by leveraging any external cloud (AWS, Heroku, Azure, GCP) or on-premise platform.

Do you like what you see? You can check out this product datasheet to understand the features & capabilities of these applications a little better! To know even more about our amazing data archiving solutions or how they can help you avoid hitting the data storage limits, please get in touch with us.