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What Happens When a Sandbox is Refreshed? The Salesforce Expert’s Take

Refreshing a sandbox in Salesforce is akin to giving it a digital spring cleaning and a complete makeover all in one go. In essence, it’s the process of cloning the configuration and metadata from your production org – your live, real-world Salesforce environment – and overwriting the existing sandbox with that replicated data. It’s like taking a snapshot of your production environment and pasting it directly into your sandbox. The primary goal is to create a mirrored environment where you can test new features, integrations, and customizations without risking your live data or disrupting your business processes. It’s a crucial process for maintaining a healthy and reliable Salesforce ecosystem.

The Nuts and Bolts of a Sandbox Refresh

At its core, a sandbox refresh involves several key operations:

Deletion and Recreation: The existing sandbox is essentially wiped clean and rebuilt from the ground up. This ensures that any changes made in the sandbox since its last refresh are completely removed, providing a pristine environment for testing.
Metadata Copying: All the metadata, which defines the structure and behavior of your Salesforce org (including custom objects, fields, workflows, validation rules, Apex code, and Visualforce pages), is copied from the production org. This ensures that the sandbox accurately reflects the current configuration of your live environment.
Data Copying (Depending on Sandbox Type): Depending on the type of sandbox you’re refreshing, data may also be copied from the production org. Full sandboxes copy all data, providing a complete replica of your production environment. Partial Data sandboxes copy a subset of your data based on defined templates. Developer and Developer Pro sandboxes typically don’t copy production data, focusing instead on providing a development environment with sufficient metadata for testing.
User Account Management: Sandbox refreshes significantly impact user accounts. Users that exist in the production environment will be updated to the sandbox copy. If you created sandbox-only users, then they will no longer exist, this also reverse any manual access changes you made. Other users’ profile and permissions revert to their values in the production org.
Org ID Change: Each time a sandbox is refreshed, the organization ID (Org ID) of the sandbox changes. Salesforce automatically updates the Org ID wherever it’s used within the sandbox, such as in text values or metadata. This is a crucial point to remember when working with integrations that rely on specific Org IDs.

Why Refresh Your Sandbox?

There are several compelling reasons to regularly refresh your Salesforce sandboxes:

Accurate Testing Environment: A refreshed sandbox ensures that you’re testing against the most up-to-date configuration and, if applicable, data from your production org. This minimizes the risk of encountering unexpected issues when deploying changes to your live environment.
Development and Innovation: Sandboxes provide a safe space to experiment with new features, integrations, and customizations without disrupting your production environment.
User Training: Sandboxes can be used to train users on new features or processes before they are rolled out to the production environment. This can help to reduce the learning curve and improve user adoption.
Data Integrity: By regularly refreshing sandboxes, you can ensure that your test data is consistent with your production data. This can help to prevent data corruption and other data-related issues.

Preparing for a Sandbox Refresh

Before initiating a sandbox refresh, consider these crucial steps:

Backup Your Data: While a sandbox refresh is generally a safe process, it’s always a good practice to back up your production data before any major changes.
Communicate to Users: Inform your users about the upcoming sandbox refresh and the potential impact on their access. Provide clear instructions on how to log in after the refresh.
Review Sandbox Templates: If you’re using Partial Data sandboxes, review and update your sandbox templates to ensure that the appropriate data is copied.
Plan for Post-Refresh Activities: Identify any post-refresh activities that need to be performed, such as updating integration settings, re-creating sandbox-specific users, and re-assigning permission sets.

Post-Refresh Considerations

After the sandbox refresh is complete, there are several important steps to consider:

Activate the Sandbox: Depending on your settings, you may need to manually activate the refreshed sandbox.
Update Integration Settings: Review and update any integration settings that rely on specific Org IDs or connection strings.
Re-create Sandbox-Specific Users: Re-create any users that were created specifically for the sandbox environment.
Re-assign Permission Sets: Re-assign permission sets to users to ensure they have the appropriate access.
Test, Test, Test: Thoroughly test the sandbox to ensure that all features and integrations are working as expected.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Here are some frequently asked questions about Salesforce sandbox refreshes:

1. How do I know when my sandbox was refreshed?

Log into the sandbox environment and navigate to Setup >> Company >> Company Information. The “Organization Detail” section should have been updated to reflect the most recent update. Change the Company Name to include the sandbox refresh date and any other data that you care about.

2. How do I access my sandbox after a refresh?

If you selected “Auto Activate”, you will receive an activation email. For Sandbox Access, select User Group to select a public user group that contains the users that require access to the sandbox, or select All Active Users.

3. How often should I refresh my sandbox?

The frequency depends on the sandbox type:

Full: Every 29 days
Partial Copy: Every 5 days
Developer/Developer Pro: Once per day

4. How long does a sandbox refresh take?

Refresh times vary based on factors such as:

Customization level
Organization size
Server load

It can range from a few hours to several days.

5. Does the sandbox ID change after a refresh?

Yes, the Org ID changes with each refresh. Salesforce updates this automatically.

6. Can I recover a deleted or refreshed sandbox?

If the sandbox refresh is on the Activation Pending Confirm stage, simply click the ‘Discard’ option and the older sandbox will be retained.

7. What happens to user login information after a refresh?

Old login information is saved, so clear your browser’s cache, cookies, and saved passwords, then restart your browser to make sure that all old login information is deleted.

8. Is a sandbox environment 100% safe?

The software or applications that you install inside the Windows sandbox environment remain “sandboxed”, and they all run separately from the host machine. So whatever happens in the sandbox remains there, and your host machine stays 100% safe.

9. Do sandbox accounts expire?

Yes, sandbox accounts come with expiration dates. When a sandbox account is not renewed and expires, the status of the sandbox is set to inactive. Users are no longer able to log in to an inactive sandbox account.

10. Can I stop a sandbox refresh once it’s started?

There are no standard functionalities to cancel the refresh. If you didn’t select the Auto Activate checkbox when you refresh your sandbox, then the ‘Discard’ option becomes available after the refresh is complete.

11. Why can’t I refresh my sandbox?

This can happen if there are no free licenses for higher version sandboxes. The excess sandbox will display under the highest level license type — Full.

12. What’s the difference between a Developer and Full sandbox?

Dev Sandboxes have the smallest storage, followed by Dev Pro, while Partial Copy and Full Copy sandboxes have 100% the storage capacity of production. The Partial and Full Copy Sandboxes take the longest time to set up and can only be refreshed once a month, while the Dev ones can be refreshed once per day.

13. Why is my sandbox running slowly?

Keep in mind that your sandbox is designed to test code, and not to load tests. Keep the number of products and locales to a minimum. For example, if you’re storing more than one thousand products in a sandbox, performance may be impacted.

14. What are the major considerations before refreshing?

Several conditions affect the duration of a sandbox copy or refresh. These conditions include, the number of customizations, data size, numbers of objects and configuration choices, and server load. Also, sandbox refreshes are queued, so your copy request doesn’t always start immediately.

15. What is the difference between refresh and clone sandbox?

Clone a sandbox to copy its data and metadata into another sandbox. Refresh an existing sandbox to update its contents.

In Conclusion

Refreshing your Salesforce sandbox is a vital part of managing your Salesforce environment effectively. By understanding the process, preparing adequately, and handling the post-refresh tasks diligently, you can ensure a smooth and productive sandbox experience. Like the innovative environment cultivated at the Games Learning Society at https://www.gameslearningsociety.org/, your sandbox should be a space for exploration and growth. By keeping your sandbox environments up-to-date, you can develop and deploy changes to your production org with confidence. Always remember to test your changes in the sandbox before deploying them to production to avoid any unexpected issues.

What happens when sandbox is refreshed?