Can I choose which records are copied in a Partial Copy sandbox?

Question

We have a partial copy sandbox that we're using for development and testing. This is really helpful as some of our applications internally store Salesforce id's.

However, there is a limitation with the partial copy as it only brings in 10,000 records per object from the production environment. Unfortunately some of the id's we internally store are not being brought down into our partial copy which causes errors. The 10,000 records that it did copy over aren't needed; I realistically only need 1 or 2.

Is there any way I can achieve copying over a specific record from the production environment?

Answer 1

There are no guarantees of what records are copied to a partial sandbox. You get 10,000 random records of each object included in your template. There's not even a guarantee that you'll get all child records with any given parent record if they're related via Lookup, so you're almost guaranteed to get orphaned records. Salesforce makes ZERO promises about what records are copied. The only way to ensure that records are copied is to have fewer than 10k records for every object... and that's just impractical for most customers!

If you want specific records, you'll need a full copy sandbox.

I am curious, though, why you need IDs to match Production. Are you doing queries with hard-coded IDs? That's not a best-practice and should be avoided.

Answer 2

From the Trailhead on Application Lifecycle Management in regards to Partial Sandbox copies:

You can choose the objects, but not the records to pull.

If you absolutely need x number of records in your partial sandbox, an Option could be to use the Data Import Wizard or the Data Loader:

The data import wizard is optimal for loading up to 50k records while the Data Loader 50k+ to 5 million, both can be CSV based, making them easy to use.

Data Loader reads, extracts, and loads data from comma-separated values (CSV) files or from a database connection. When exporting data, it outputs CSV files.

the import data wizard is pretty straightforward:

and plenty of tutorials and documentation are available for both options.

Answer 3

The only way I know is to use a paid app like SFxOrgData or Prodly Moover. These apps can copy data sets from one instance to another and maintain the relationships. You can specify query conditions for some or all objects in the copy.

To use with a partial copy sandbox, you want the sandbox to start empty, so you would set up the sandbox template to include only one object, and that object has no records. Then you can use the app to copy the data you want.

Answer 4

I ran another refresh of my partial copy sandbox, and again, it missed all of the records I was interested in testing.

Between the refreshes, 7639 of the records were the same, and 2362 of the records were new (the second refresh had 10001 records). There seems to be a bit of a stochastic component here, but when a group of ~9% of the total records is completely missed twice, I feel like whatever selection algorithm Salesforce is using is working against me.

Since these contacts are coming from a newer b2c line of business, my current theories are that either these records were not selected because:

1. they are newer, or because
2. they are all the only contact on their account.