To reduce data storage costs, keep only the data you need, and keep each piece on the cheapest storage that still meets its access and compliance needs.
The main ways to reduce storage costs are sorting data by access frequency, deleting redundant data, moving cold data to lower cost storage options, backing up only what changed and checking data usage every quarter.
Everything below works for cloud storage, on-premises storage and Salesforce alike. Where Salesforce does things differently, we've called it out.
What drives data storage costs?
Storage capacity is only part of your storage bills. Data storage costs also depend on which storage tier you use, and the colder tiers add retrieval fees and minimum storage periods on top.
Then there are the copies. A single customer table might live in production, in two sandboxes, in last night's backup and in an export someone made for a board report, and you pay for every one of them. That data buildup is how storage costs creep up without anyone noticing.
How much does each storage tier cost?
Cloud providers charge less for less frequently accessed data. Amazon S3 is cloud object storage, and here are its published storage prices for US East (N. Virginia), checked in October 2026.
At 1 TB, that's about $23.55 a month in S3 Standard and about $1.01 in Glacier Deep Archive.
The catch is that colder tiers charge you to get data back, and they bill the full minimum period if you delete early, so look at the access patterns of a dataset before you move it.
How does Salesforce storage affect your costs?
Salesforce keeps two separate pools. Data storage holds your records, and file storage holds attachments, files and content.
According to Salesforce Help, most paid editions get 10 GB of data storage plus extra storage for each user license. A 10-user Professional Edition org, for example, ends up with 10.2 GB in total.
File storage is 10 GB per org on Contact Manager, Group, Professional, Enterprise, Performance and Unlimited Editions. Once you start running low, you can either buy more storage from Salesforce or move data out.
If you want the detail on both pools, we've covered Salesforce storage limits and the cost of Salesforce file storage in separate posts.
8 ways to reduce data storage costs
1. Classify data and automate lifecycle rules
Data lifecycle management starts here, because you can't tier data until you know what it is.
So the first job is sorting it by how often people use it, which regulations apply to it and how much it matters to the business.
A live pricing table probably needs fast storage and frequent backups. Last year's support cases can sit on standard storage with regular archiving, and records nobody has opened in years belong somewhere cheap.
Once the classes exist, automated lifecycle management rules do the moving for you. Data drops to a cheaper tier as it ages, and gets deleted once no retention rule says you have to keep it.
If you're in a regulated industry, those retention rules will come partly from requirements like SOX compliance. Set data retention policies for each data class first, and build the lifecycle rules after. Our guide to Salesforce retention policies walks through it.
2. Remove duplicate and abandoned data
You've probably seen them: three copies of the same contact, a folder of files from a project that ended in 2021, a test object nobody deleted. Outdated data like this costs money to keep, and deleting data you don't need is one of the quickest ways to reduce data storage costs.
Tools that look at file metadata, content and access history can help you find it. Deleting it safely takes a bit more care.
We'd suggest a simple routine. Flag the data that looks redundant or obsolete, tell whoever owns it, and give them a set review period.
Nothing gets deleted without explicit approval. If something has to be kept, archive it first with a Salesforce data archiving approach, then delete the original.
Repeat this every quarter or twice a year, and ask each team to justify what it's holding on to.
3. Tier storage by how often data is accessed
Not everything needs high performance storage. Tiered storage, or data tiering, sorts data into hot, warm and cold.
Hot storage is for frequently accessed data, the critical data people use all the time. Warm storage suits data you need now and then but still want quickly, and cold storage is for data you rarely read and can wait for.
Automated policies can tier data based on usage patterns and data access, not guesses. Using the prices in the table above, moving cold data from S3 Standard to Glacier Deep Archive cuts its storage price by about 96%. If your cold data sits in an object storage data lake, tier it rather than keeping the entire data lake on hot storage.
For Salesforce backups, Flosum Backup & Archive runs as a Flosum Cloud App, either Flosum-hosted on Flosum-managed AWS or customer-hosted on your own AWS, Azure or GCP.
There's also a hybrid option, where Flosum runs the application but writes backup data to an S3 bucket or Azure Blob container you own, under your own retention rules.
4. Use compression and deduplication
Compression stores the same data in fewer bits, which shrinks your storage footprint. Deduplication goes a step further and keeps just one copy of anything that repeats.
Which method you pick depends on the data.
Lossless methods such as DEFLATE or LZMA keep every detail, so they're right for text, documents and records, while lossy compression shrinks images and video at an acceptable loss of quality.
Deduplication can work on whole files or on smaller blocks. The block-level kind is especially handy for backups, since a large file may change only slightly from one run to the next.
Don't expect the same results everywhere. Text-heavy data usually compresses well, but a folder of JPEGs or MP4s is already compressed and won't shrink much.
Heavy compression trades storage savings for compute costs, because compressed data takes processing time to read. Keep the most aggressive settings for data you rarely open. If you're compressing backups, it's worth reading our post on secure and compliant Salesforce backup as well.
5. Back up incrementally instead of in full every time
Your backup method has a big say in how much backup storage you pay for. A full backup copies everything, every time.
An incremental backup stores only what changed since the last backup of any kind. A differential backup stores everything that changed since the last full one.
A common routine mixes them. You take a full backup as a baseline, run incremental or differential backups after it, and take a fresh full backup now and then to consolidate.
How you balance them depends on how often your data changes and how fast you need to restore.
Flosum Backup & Archive supports scheduled, incremental and high-frequency backups, so you can set the frequency to match your recovery point objective.
It's also worth checking the routine against the 3-2-1 backup rule. For the bigger picture, see our Salesforce backup and recovery strategy guide.
6. Bring shadow data under management
Shadow data is anything living outside IT's view, like a pricing spreadsheet on someone's laptop or a cloud app a team signed up for on a credit card.
It might start as a quick fix, but nobody's tracking what it costs or what it exposes.
Finding it takes a bit of detective work. Scan the network for data stores you didn't approve, talk to department leads, and look at which cloud services people are actually paying for.
Then offer a short, no-blame amnesty so teams can own up safely. After that, make new tools easy to request, so people don't feel they have to go around IT again.
7. Combine your own storage with cloud storage
Hybrid cloud storage means using your own data center or on-premises infrastructure and the cloud side by side. Sensitive data can stay on systems you control, while the cloud soaks up the overflow.
Before you split anything, decide where each dataset should live based on how sensitive it is and how often it's read.
Check what performance and latency each workload needs, and confirm the setup still meets your regulatory and security requirements.
Plan data transfer carefully, too. Providers such as AWS charge for data moved out of their cloud, and those egress fees can surprise you in cloud environments.
With Salesforce, where data is stored also matters for residency. Our guide to Salesforce Hyperforce explains how your region choice affects compliance.
For real cost optimization, don't stop at the price per GB when you compare options. Add in the staff time it takes to run each one, what it costs to meet compliance standards, and any retrieval and transfer charges.
8. Audit storage usage every quarter
A quarterly audit is where you catch the slow leaks: allocations nobody uses, stale or duplicate data, and settings nobody has looked at in a while.
In Salesforce, the Storage Usage page in Setup shows storage in use per record type, the top users by storage and the largest files. It's the obvious place to start when you're deciding which objects to archive first.
Each quarter, compare what you're allocated with what you actually use, and look at how fast data is growing. Then find your biggest storage consumers and check them against your retention policies.
While you're there, look for orphaned or unused data. It's also a good time to check whether compression and deduplication are doing as much as you expected.
Keep a few numbers from one quarter to the next, such as monthly storage spend, storage used against allocation and the share of duplicate data. Trends are easier to spot than a single snapshot, and they show whether your data management changes are delivering cost savings.
How do you archive Salesforce data to cut storage costs?
Archiving moves older records out of your Salesforce org to cheaper storage, so you stop storing data on your most expensive tier. That frees up data storage without deleting history you still have to keep.
For very large datasets, Salesforce also offers big objects, and allocates 1 million big object records per org in Enterprise, Performance and Unlimited Editions, among others.
With Flosum Backup & Archive, you can move older records to low-cost storage you control, with policy-driven retention. The archived data stays available for audits and reporting through in-place queries.
FAQs
Book a demo to see how Flosum Backup & Archive can lower your Salesforce storage costs.
Thank you for subscribing
