What is Salesforce Data Storage and How to Optimize It?

Salesforce is widely used by companies for customer relationship management (CRM), helping them build better connections with customers and partners. However, as companies rely more on Salesforce to track customer activities, manage marketing efforts, and store large volumes of data, efficient data management becomes essential. Without proper storage optimization, high data volumes can impact Salesforce’s performance. 

In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about Salesforce Data Storage—from its architecture and benefits to limitations for efficient data management—so your organization can handle data growth effectively and maintain peak Salesforce performance.

What is Salesforce?

Salesforce is a customer relationship management (CRM) product that helps bring companies and customers together. It’s an integrated CRM platform that gives all your company departments a single, shared view of each customer. 

Before Salesforce, companies hosted their CRM solutions on their own server. Due to this, companies took a lot of time and cost to have their own CRM solutions. Even after setting up a CRM solution, it was not easy to use it. This changed after the introduction of Salesforce. 

Salesforce delivers affordable CRM software completely online as a service. The idea behind Salesforce was to do away with the lengthy installation process for CRM software and move everything to the cloud. 

You need to have a Salesforce account in order to be able to use Salesforce services.

What is Salesforce Data Storage?

Salesforce Data Storage is the space within Salesforce where all the data related to customer interactions, marketing activities, and business processes is stored. This vast data storage is critical to managing daily CRM activities but can quickly become overwhelming as data volumes grow. Without proactive data management strategies, organizations risk experiencing degraded performance in Salesforce.

Knowing how to optimize and manage Salesforce Data Storage effectively is essential for every Salesforce user, enabling better control over data growth and ensuring that Salesforce remains responsive and efficient as your business expands.

What are the Salesforce Data Storage Types?

File Storage and Salesforce Data Storage are the two types of storage available in Salesforce. The term “File Storage” refers to the area set aside for the storing of data (e.g., attachments, user photos, and documents). The term “Salesforce Data Storage” refers to the designated space for storing records (e.g., Accounts, Opportunities, and Cases).

The complete list for each storage type can be found below.

1) File Storage:

• Attached documents
• Files tab contains Salesforce CRM Content Chatter files, which include user photographs.
• Site.com assets have a custom file filed on Knowledge articles.

2) Salesforce Data Storage:

• Members of the Campaign
• Cases
• Case Study Groups
• Contacts
• Contracts
• Objects made to order
• messages sent by email
• Items in the Event CalendarAccounts
• Types of articles
• Translations of article types
• Campaigns
• Ideas for Google Docs
• Email Notes for Leads List
• Opportunities
• Splitting Up Chances
• Orders
• Quotes
• Rich Text Data Solutions Quote Template 
• Tasks with their own tags
• All Field Service-related artifacts Enabling lightning

Salesforce Data Storage Best Practices

Here are some best practices tips that one should follow while building your Salesforce Cloud Storage Management strategy.

• Merge or integrate those objects that are not related to CRM.
• Reduce the size of data by archiving it because reducing the volume of data cuts the cost of using Cloud Storage and also increases the performance.
• Large objects need data optimization.
• Don’t use data in Salesforce that doesn’t belong to CRM.
• Document every release with corporate standards.

Data Storage Salesforce Pricing

All pricing plans are billed annually. The most demanding one is the Enterprise edition which is subscribed to by many companies. All 5 editions will deliver the same speed but different storage capacities for records and other features.

Salesforce Additional Data Storage Costs

Salesforce also offers additional Salesforce Data Storage that helps companies get extra Cloud Storage and don’t need to upgrade the plan. Salesforce provides additional Cloud Storage in blocks of 50 or 500 MB that costs up to $125 per month. Also, it gives storage on rent for 1GB of storage for $5 monthly.

Salesforce charges additionally for services and 24/7 customer support till the time you use Cloud Storage. Implementing the Salesforce Data Storage can cost between $5,000 and $80,000. The IT support charges 15% of the license price.

For mobile device support, you might require hiring a professional application developer that can cost around $50,000 to $250,000. 

Data Storage vs. File Storage Salesforce

The Salesforce Data Storage capacity for Contact Manager, Group, Essentials, Professional, Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited editions is 10 GB. While the Developer gets 5MB and Personal gets 20 MB of Salesforce Data Storage. 

The File Storage allocation per user license for Contact Managers, Groups, and Professionals gets 612 MB, Enterprise and Unlimited edition get 2 GB.

Limitations

Although it is possible for you to optimize Salesforce data storage, you will experience the following drawbacks:

1. It may be difficult for you to identify what is causing a degradation in performance. 
2. The optimization process may take a long time, especially when you have to remove data manually. 
3. You may be required to purchase an external tool to help you optimize your Salesforce data storage. 

What happens when you run out of Salesforce Data Storage?

When you reach the Salesforce Data Storage limit, Salesforce will send an email to your administrator informing them that they must either:

• Delete files and/or data from your instance to clean it up or
• More Salesforce Data Storage should be purchased.

Records will no longer be able to update and processes will break down if nothing is done to reduce the number of files and/or reduce Salesforce Data Storage or to increase storage size.

The fact that file and data storage are updated asynchronously adds to the problem, as new records are not instantly reflected in storage. In layman’s terms, this means that if you upload a significant amount of data and don’t see it right away, you may unknowingly exceed your storage limit.

How much Salesforce Data Storage do you have?

The quantity of storage you get for each storage type is determined by your Salesforce edition and the number of users you have (see the table below for a breakdown).

If you have the Enterprise edition with 20 users, you’ll get 10GB of data storage plus an extra 20MB per person (10.4GB total) and 10GB of file storage plus an extra 2GB per user (50GB total).

How to Check your Salesforce Data Storage?

Navigate to Setup and type “Storage” in the Quick Find box to examine your organization’s storage usage. To see the Limit, Amount Used, Percentage Used, and Usage Breakdowns for each storage type, click on the Storage Usage. It will also show you who the most popular users are for each genre.
You’ll have a lot better sense of where you need to expand storage space after obtaining data points on your Salesforce Data Storage consumption.

How to Increase your Salesforce Data Storage?

There are several options for expanding your organization’s Salesforce Data Storage capacity”

• Using tools like Salesforce’s Mass Delete Records function (enter “Delete” in the Setup Quick Find box), Salesforce Data Loader, or any other Third-Party similar data movement tool like Hevo, you can manually eliminate superfluous files and/or data.

• If removing files and/or data isn’t an option, you can use App Exchange programs to clean up files and/or data. To help free up data storage for your Salesforce instance, apps like Task Archiver can relocate tasks to files or delete tasks that fulfill user-defined criteria.
• Last resort options include purchasing additional Salesforce Data Storage or upgrading your Salesforce edition, both of which can be costly. Maintaining a well-maintained instance and staying ahead of difficulties requires a robust business workflow and methodology.

Issues Caused by Large Data Volumes

Large volumes of data are associated with performance-related issues. 

Examples of such issues include longer than expected search times, longer record saving times, long wait times to access records and populate fields on the screen, and other actions taking too much time to be completed. 

Other than performance issues, large data volumes can cause record locking issues on parent records with large numbers of child records. Every time that a child record is saved, its parent record is locked temporarily. This means that if thousands of child records are to be updated simultaneously, their corresponding parent records will remain locked for long periods of time. This is a huge inconvenience!

Next, I will be showing you some of the actions that you can take to protect the performance of your organization and see success when using Salesforce. 

Part 3: How to Optimize your Salesforce Data Model and Avoid Performance Degradation?

Take the following measures:

#1: Build an Effective Archiving and Reporting Strategy

Salesforce has a number of tools that can help companies with large volumes of data to handle their data. 

These tools can work wonders, but they won’t be very effective without a proper underlying plan on how to utilize them. 

So, you must come up with effective data management and reporting strategy before you can implement any technical strategy. 

#2: Choose a Data Management Tool

Now that you have a proper data management strategy, it is time to determine the best way to execute it. 

The good thing is that Salesforce comes with a number of tools that can help you do that. 

Examples of such tools include the Data Storage Optimizer which was designed for Salesforce.org customers and Big Objects which helps Salesforce users to archive their data without the need for an external application.

#3: Remove Unnecessary Data Manually

If there is unnecessary data stored in your Salesforce account, you can delete it. This is good for preventing the degradation of performance from occurring. There are a number of tools that you can use to delete data manually:

• Salesforce’s Mass Delete Wizard- This is a web-based deletion wizard provided by Salesforce. 

It allows you to delete Activities, Leads, Accounts, Cases, Contacts, Solutions, Products, and Reports. 

Currently, Mass Delete has a limit of 250 records and can only be used to delete named objects, meaning that it will not be a silver bullet for you. 

It is available in all Salesforce editions except Database.com in which it is available as an API for custom object removal only. 

• ETL (Extract, Transform, Loading) Tools- These tools are mostly used for data migration but they can also be used for data removal. 

A good example of an ETL tool is the Salesforce Data Loader which can delete data from Salesforce and access all Custom and Standard objects. A SOSQL relationship query or a .csv file with the records to be deleted will be needed. 

Other popular ETL tools include JitterBit and Dataloader.io. Most ETL tools are paid and they need a significant evaluation to ensure that they meet your requirements. 

Ensure that the ETL tool that you choose supports your Salesforce edition. 

#4: Remove Unnecessary Data Automatically

If you need to spend only a little time removing data, you can automate the process using Storage Helper, which is a native Salesforce AppExchange app. 

Although it has a paid edition, you can begin by using its Free Edition. 

However, it’s paid edition is priced cheaply compared to what you will get in terms of data removal. 

#5: Purchase Additional Salesforce Data Storage

If you don’t want to remove your data, you can consider buying additional storage space. However, this can be expensive for you. 

You can also choose to use the higher per-user data storage limits offered to the users of Performance and Unlimited editions. 

The good thing about purchasing additional storage is that you will not have to worry about removing data. 

Conclusion

Salesforce Data Storage is essential for maintaining CRM performance and data efficiency. By adopting storage management practices—such as archiving old data, removing unnecessary records, and optimizing your data model—you can keep your Salesforce instance responsive and scalable. Manual and automated tools, along with additional storage or plan upgrades, may also be necessary for managing high data volumes.

For a streamlined, reliable data management solution, consider using Hevo Data. Hevo’s no-code platform provides a hassle-free way to integrate, manage, and transform data from multiple sources like Salesforce, ensuring that your data is analysis-ready in real-time. Sign up for a 14-day free trial and experience the feature-rich Hevo suite firsthand.

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