Definition
A Full Sandbox is a complete copy of a production Salesforce organization, including all metadata, standard and custom object records, attachments, and documents. It has a 29-day refresh interval and is ideal for comprehensive testing scenarios such as performance testing, load testing, and user acceptance testing. Full Sandboxes provide the most realistic testing environment since they mirror the entire production dataset.
Real-World Example
a Salesforce administrator at Coastal Health uses Full Sandbox to maintain data quality and enforce organizational policies across the platform. By properly setting up Full Sandbox, they prevent common data entry errors and ensure that users follow established business processes, which saves the support team hours of cleanup work each week.
Why Full Sandbox Matters
A Full Sandbox is a complete copy of a production Salesforce organization, including all metadata, standard and custom object records, attachments, and documents. It's the largest sandbox type and has a 29-day refresh interval. Because it mirrors the entire production dataset, it's the most realistic testing environment available, ideal for performance testing, load testing, user acceptance testing (UAT), and any scenario requiring real production data volumes.
Full Sandboxes are typically the most expensive sandbox type and are reserved for use cases that need production data. The 29-day refresh interval reflects the heavy operation of copying everything from production: it's not something you do casually. Mature deployments use Full Sandboxes for the highest-fidelity testing (UAT, performance, dress rehearsals) and lighter sandbox types (Developer, Developer Pro, Partial Copy) for everything else. Configuration of which data to mask or sanitize is important if production data contains PII or other sensitive information.
How Organizations Use Full Sandbox
- •NovaScale — Maintains a Full Sandbox for UAT, refreshing it before each major release. The realistic data lets users test against scenarios identical to production.
- •Vertex Global — Uses their Full Sandbox for performance testing before major releases, running synthetic load against production-like data volumes to catch bottlenecks.
- •Coastal Health — Sanitizes PHI in their Full Sandbox after each refresh, since clinical staff use the sandbox for testing but shouldn't see real patient data.