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Today’s guest post is delivered by Gilad David Maayan, a technology writer who has worked with over 150 technology companies including SAP, Samsung NEXT, NetApp and Imperva, producing technical and thought leadership content that elucidates technical solutions for developers and IT leadership.

When developing an app, you need to know how data is stored, structured, and organized. This information is crucial when building, maintaining, and updating your software. It can also help you understand what are the capabilities of this build, how far you can take it, and when it will need to be scaled up. 

In Salesforce, you can use two types of storage for data and for files, but there are five methods designed for specific use cases — files, CRM, documents, attachments, and knowledge. In this article, you will learn how storage works in Salesforce, including tips to help you avoid hitting your storage limits.

How Data is Stored in Salesforce

When working with Salesforce, there are several reliable and efficient ways to store your data. This includes media files, customer profiles, documents, and presentations. This storage is broken down into two types — data and file. 

Data storage includes many fields, such as accounts, cases, custom objects, events, opportunities, and notes. This data is automatically stored within the Salesforce database and you do not have individual control over where specific items go. 

File storage includes attachment files, customer content, media, Chatter files, documents, and custom files in Knowledge articles. This content you can individually control depending on how it is created and attached. Below are the five methods you can use for file storage.

Files

Salesforce Files is a storage location you can use to store any type of file. Salesforce has positioned it to replace most of the following methods as it offers more features and functionality. Files enables you to follow specific files, generate links, share files with users or groups, and collaborate on files. In Files, each file can be up to 2GB. 

Customer relationship management (CRM) content

Salesforce CRM content is where you can store files that you want to publish and share with coworkers and customers. For example, presentations or content packs. This can include marketing files, document templates, media, or support files. This storage type supports files up to 2GB although this drops to 10MB depending on how you upload data. 

Documents

Documents storage enables you to store a variety of web resources, including logos, email templates, and Visualforce materials. When files are stored here, you do not have to attach data to specific records. In Documents, files can be up to 5MB.

One thing to keep in mind — if you are using an older version of Salesforce Documents storage is still available. However, if you are using Lightning Experience, this functionality has been replaced by Files. When you update your Salesforce, you need to convert your Documents to Files before you can access your data. 

Attachments

Attachments is a storage area you can use for files that you want to attach to specific records. For example, marketing campaigns, cases, or contact information. The downside of Attachments is that you can’t share files with links and do not have access to version control. In Attachments, files can be up to 25MB and feeds can be up to 2GB.

Knowledge

Knowledge is a storage area you can use to create and store knowledge base articles. These files can be searched by internal users and shared with customers through your portals or Lightning Platform Sites. In Knowledge, each article can be up to 5MB.

How to Avoid Hitting Your Storage Limits in Salesforce

Regardless of how you store and manage your files in Salesforce, you need to be aware of what your storage limits are and how to make the most of those limits. You should also be aware of what alternative options you have to expand your storage. 

Storing data outside of Salesforce

Sometimes, the most practical option is to store some of your data outside of Salesforce. One reason for this is your storage limits. In Salesforce you are allowed:

  • Data storage—10GB of base storage plus 20MB of storage per user. If you are using Performance or Unlimited versions, user storage is 120MB per. However, the Developer, Personal, or Essentials versions follow different rules with no user data and 5MB, 20MB, and 10GB respectively.
  • FIle storage—for most plans you get 10GB per organization and from 612MB to 2GB per user. For the Developer and Personal plan you get 20MB, and for Essentials you get 1GB. No user data is provided for these plans.

Even if your data is still within storage limits, keeping redundant or unnecessary data in Salesforce can cause issues, including:

  • Degraded performance
  • Inaccurate reporting
  • Inefficient searches

To avoid these issues and ensure that your limits are not exceeded, you might consider adopting a cloud storage service. These services can provide scalable, cheap storage that you can connect with API or third-party extensions to your Salesforce system. 

For example, Azure File Storage by NetApp can provide a standard file system format that you can use from anywhere, including hybrid systems. Or, AWS S3 services can be connected for unstructured storage and any type of data. 

Cleaning up unwanted data

Maybe you do not want to store data outside of Salesforce or you have already moved data but still want to improve storage efficiency. In these cases, you can focus on cleaning your data. You can do this either manually or automatically depending on the type of data you’re trying to eliminate. 

For manual clean-up, Salesforce provides a native deletion wizard. You can use this wizard to eliminate old accounts, contacts, activities, leads, or cases. To identify data that is safe to remove you can run a report to see when data was last used and eliminate things before a certain date. Or, you can individually delete data as users inform you it’s no longer accurate.

Another option is to use extract, transform, load (ETL) tools to pull your data, process it (removing unnecessary data), and load the remaining data back in. This option enables you to script clean-up based on whatever parameters you’d like. However, it can be a lengthy process and requires the help of external tools, such as Salesforce Data Loader or Informatica.

Archiving data

During your data downsizing, you will probably find data that you no longer need in your system but that you don’t want to delete. For example old client files that you need to keep for compliance, historical customer reports, or knowledge base articles for legacy products or services. 

If you have data like this that you want ‘just in case’, archiving is your best option. Archiving enables you to export data from your system, compress it for efficiency, and store it wherever you prefer. 

Often, the previously mentioned cloud services are a good option for this. Many services have cold storage tiers available that are much cheaper than on-premise storage. These services enable you to store large volumes of data that you rarely need to access and can eliminate worries about data corruption or loss due to hardware failure. 

Conclusion

Salesforce comes with a specific data management build that you need to comply with. The two basic data types are data and files, and these are sorted further into five organizational types — files, CRM, documents, attachments, and knowledge. However, you do not have to use all of these. Recent Salesforce change enables you to store most of these elements as files. 

Whichever structure you choose, be sure to continually monitor and optimize your storage. Adding monitoring on a regular basis can help you optimize both performance and billing. To avoid hitting your storage limit, you can store data outside of Salesforce, clean up unwanted data, and archive cold data.