Spring Clean Your Data: Why Archiving Is the Ultimate Organizational Tool

The birds are chirping, the buds are sprouting, and your Salesforce org is overflowing with data. If this sounds like the start of spring for you, you’re not alone. In this blog, we'll break down some essential spring cleaning tips for your Salesforce data and why archiving plays a pivotal role in cleanliness–season after season. 

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Declutter without deleting  

No matter how vigilant you are, it’s only a matter of time before clutter starts creeping into your home, disrupting your productivity and flow. Turns out, the same principle applies to your live production org. As new data pours in, your Salesforce production org can become clogged. And, this evolves into more than just a performance issue; it can also force you to spend more time sorting through what you don’t need to find what you do. 

When spring cleaning your data, it’s important to declutter your live production org, which you can best achieve through archiving. Unlike a spring cleaning purge, archiving allows to easily relocate data instead of permanently deleting it, and can be returned to the live environment if needed. Archiving also debloats the system, speeding up performance for both users and the platform as a whole. And you’ll be able to see the most relevant data upfront, which keeps your spring cleaning initiative alive– long after spring has sprung. 

Even before you decide to archive, the data categorization process proves to be a useful cleaning exercise. It helps organizations take an objective look at their data and decide what is necessary for mission-critical business operations and what is outdated and unused. In addition, by conducting this Salesforce data inventory, you can gauge the types of data that you’re dealing with, and if it deserves to stay in production or not.  

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Make organization a priority 

Spring cleaning isn’t just about being clean– it’s also about being organized. This is a significant consideration when decluttering your live production environment. If you make all the effort to clean up your data–only to relocate it to a disorganized environment– you’re essentially setting yourself up for double the work (and double the headache) if and when you need access to it again. 

To avoid this, source an automated archiving solution that lets you archive the right data at the right time, automatically. Not only does it keep your Salesforce live production org organized, but it keeps your teams organized too. With an automated archiving solution, your teams are freed up from the manual archiving legwork: logging in to Salesforce, executing the queries, and then ensuring that no data was accidentally lost or deleted in the process. 

A high level of organization should also apply to your data’s relationships. Your third-party archiving solution should maintain parent-child record and attachment relationships, if the information ever needs to return to production. Having a solution that keeps its related contents intact is critical: it minimizes the possibility of orphan records, along with the laborious tasks that come with piecing data relationships back together. 

Insufficient organizational capabilities can also trigger bigger consequences than just added work. If you’re in an industry with strict data retention and deletion requirements, it’s critical that you can organize and restore data easily, or face compliance hurdles that can have reputational, financial, and legal repercussions. 

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Clean smarter, not harder 

While traditional spring cleaning is done once a year, SaaS data requires more attention and upkeep to keep it tidy. It’s considered a best practice to have a regular data organization cadence year round. However, for many companies, conducting regular maintenance can seem more like a springtime fantasy than reality if you don’t have the right solution. 

With an automated archiving solution, you can manage SaaS data efficiently and consistently. Keeping your unique data needs at the forefront, it’s best to source a solution that allows you to create and change archive policies as needed. This includes what specific data to be archived, how frequently data archiving activities occur (monthly, quarterly, semi-annually), and how long archived data is retained. Given that data’s volume and priority is always changing, your archiving policies should be just as adaptable. 

Let’s say you’re a global makeup beauty brand. Your Salesforce org is seeing a wave of new customer data daily. But, this is met with a slight downside: the fresh data is mixed in with stale, unused customer data, creating extra work for users to find active contacts. With an archiving solution, you can create and manage an archiving policy that automatically stores customer data that has been inactive for an allotted period of time. With this system in place, a customer can call to find out about their order history, and it won’t send you or your team into an organizational tailspin. You can easily access the archived records and send it back to production as needed. 

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Spring into action with Own Archive  

Revitalization and growth are pinnacles of spring–and SaaS data management. To keep your data and environments clean year round, it’s critical to have organizational systems in place that honor performance, compliance, and user needs. With Own Archive, you can. Archive allows you to improve your org speed and performance and create custom archiving policies that safely remove data from Salesforce. With its restore capabilities, you’ll feel confident knowing that relocating data is as easy as retrieving it.

To learn more, check out “Data Archiving: A Playbook for Success”, or request a demo below.