Your Salesforce org houses the customer records, documents, and operational data that drive daily business decisions. But many organizations don’t take Salesforce storage limits seriously until it’s too late. By the time systems slow down or emergency storage purchases are on the table, teams have to scramble for a quick fix.
This reactive approach creates unnecessary risks. Low storage leads to poor performance that frustrates users, potential compliance gaps when required data can't be retained, and unexpected costs from rushed purchases. Your team deserves a system that supports growth, not one that creates bottlenecks.
Strategic storage management transforms these would-be challenges into advantages. Targeted storage optimization keeps performance high, maintains compliance, and controls costs predictably. Let’s dig into ten strategies that will help you build a sustainable approach to Salesforce data management and support your organization's growth rather than limiting it.
1. Know Your Salesforce Storage Types and Limits
Salesforce organizes data into three categories, each with different performance implications and cost considerations.
Data Storage
Data Storage includes all records in your standard and custom objects, such as accounts, contacts, opportunities, cases, leads, and custom objects you've built. This business information drives daily operations and has the most direct impact on system performance since it's frequently accessed and queried.
File Storage
File Storage covers all documents, attachments, images, and files uploaded to your org. Email attachments, content library files, Chatter files, and documents in the Documents tab all live here. File storage tends to grow quickly and often becomes your largest consumer, especially when users attach large documents or high-resolution images to records.
Big Objects
Big Objects serve a specific purpose for historical data tracking and long-term archiving. These custom objects can hold millions of records without hurting performance, making them ideal for audit trails, transaction histories, or compliance information you need to keep but rarely access.
Monitoring your current usage helps you spot storage issues early and plan for archiving or cleanup. Here’s how to check your storage breakdown:
- Go to Setup
- Search for "Storage Usage" and click on it
- Hit the "Breakdown" button to see detailed consumption by category
- Take note of which record types are using the most space
You'll often find that email messages, task records with attachments, or specific custom objects eat up a surprising amount of space.
2. Understand How Salesforce Storage Limits Are Calculated
Salesforce calculates your storage limits using a base allocation plus per-user entitlements that vary by edition:
- Professional Edition: 1 GB of data storage + 20 MB per user
- Enterprise Edition: 1 GB of data storage + 120 MB per user
- Unlimited & Performance Editions: 40 GB of base data storage + more generous per-user entitlements
File storage follows different calculations, with most editions receiving 10GB of base file storage plus varying per-user allocations. These limits combine to create your total available capacity, but the calculation becomes complex when mixing user license types or adding specialized licenses.
How Record Sizes Are Calculated
Each Salesforce record includes more than just visible field data. Here's what contributes to total record size:
- System fields (like created date), audit logs, and metadata
- Text fields, which scale based on character count
- Lookup and formula fields (minimal impact)
- Long text areas, rich text fields, and embedded images (high impact)
For example, a single rich text field with images or heavy formatting might use several kilobytes per record. Multiplied across 100,000 records, that adds up fast.
Why This Matters for Optimization
When you know these calculations, you can make smarter decisions about field types, data retention policies, and capacity planning. Also, when you realize that adding a long text area field to 100,000 existing records could consume significant storage, you can evaluate whether the business value justifies the cost.
Watch your per-user consumption patterns to spot optimization opportunities:
- Inactive users: You may be paying for per-user storage that's not being used.
- Power users: Heavy content generators may require stricter retention policies.
- Department-level differences: High-attachment teams might benefit from file compression or moving content to external storage.
- Field planning: Before adding a long text area to a large object, assess whether the business need justifies the extra storage.
Understanding these patterns and trade-offs puts you in control, not just of storage costs, but of long-term performance and scalability across your Salesforce org.
3. Monitor Your Org's Storage Proactively
Reactive storage management creates business disruptions when users suddenly can't create records or upload files. This forces expensive emergency storage purchases made under pressure. Proactive monitoring prevents these scenarios.
Set Up Automated Threshold Alerts
Configure email notifications when your org reaches 80% and 90% of your Salesforce storage limits. To set up these notifications, go to:
Setup → Data Management → Storage Usage. These early warnings give you time to clean things up before hitting critical levels.
Visualize Storage Trends with Dashboards
To stay ahead of storage issues, it’s smart to visualize how your data footprint evolves over time. Use dashboards to monitor growth and spot trends before they become problems:
- Build a custom report using the Storage Usage object to monitor monthly growth
- Add a chart to your executive dashboard showing data vs. file storage trends
- Quickly identify which type of storage is growing fastest and needs attention
These visual insights help you prioritize cleanup efforts, justify storage upgrades, and keep stakeholders informed with real-time data trends.
Go Deeper with Targeted Reports
Storage bloat often hides in specific objects, old records, or oversized files. Creating focused reports helps you surface the biggest consumers and prioritize what to clean up first:
- Run a report on the ContentDocument object to find files over 5MB
- Query the Task object for records older than two years
- Use Data Loader to export record counts by object type and sort by volume
These reports help you uncover unexpected growth areas, like abandoned custom objects or legacy tasks bloating your limits.
Match Monitoring Frequency to Your Org's Size
There’s no one-size-fits-all review schedule. How often you audit storage should align with the volume and velocity of your data. Here’s a rough guideline based on organization size and activity level:
- Enterprises: Daily automated reports during peak periods like quarter-end or major campaigns
- High-volume orgs (thousands of daily records): Weekly checks
- Smaller teams: Monthly reviews
Matching your review cadence to your data load ensures you catch issues early, avoid unexpected limits, and keep your Salesforce environment running efficiently.
Salesforce's built-in reports provide basic usage breakdowns, but specialized monitoring solutions offer predictive analytics, automated cleanup recommendations, and integration with existing IT monitoring tools.
These advanced platforms spot optimization opportunities that manual reviews miss, such as detecting objects with unusual growth patterns or files approaching Salesforce's size limits before they cause upload failures.
4. Establish Secure Backups
Always back up everything before deleting data. Flosum's point-in-time backups guarantee complete recovery if requirements change later.
With backups secured, use Data Loader for bulk operations or targeted SOQL queries to identify specific record sets for removal
Be mindful of Salesforce's governor limits during mass deletions:
- Process records in batches rather than attempting thousands at once
- Schedule cleanup during off-peak hours
- Test deletion logic in sandbox first, as some objects have dependencies that cascade to related records
With reliable backup solutions providing recovery capabilities, you can implement aggressive cleanup strategies without risking permanent loss.
5. Clean Up Redundant and Unused Data
The fastest way to reclaim storage space is to remove data you no longer need. Most Salesforce orgs accumulate massive amounts of unnecessary records over time, and targeting these storage hogs can reduce costs while improving performance.
Start with the biggest culprits:
- Old tasks: Completed tasks older than six months often serve no operational purpose, especially if they include long descriptions or file attachments
- Inactive leads: Leads untouched for over a year are rarely re-engaged and can safely be archived or removed
- Closed opportunities: If they exceed your legal retention period, they may not need to stay in active storage
Don’t Overlook System-Generated Records
Not all storage issues come from user activity. Some of the biggest culprits are system-generated. These often go unnoticed but can quietly consume large amounts of space over time:
- Debug logs, API logs, and error logs can build up quickly in dev-heavy orgs, sometimes eating up gigabytes of storage
- Duplicate records from failed imports, botched integrations, or user error waste space and compromise data quality
- Sandbox test data often lingers after development is complete, contributing to silent bloat
Regularly auditing and cleaning up system-generated data helps maintain a healthier org, improves performance, and ensures storage is reserved for what really matters.
6. Archive Infrequently Accessed Data
Rather than permanently deleting valuable historical records, archiving provides a strategic middle ground that reduces consumption while preserving access when needed.
This works well for information that has regulatory retention requirements or potential future business value, but isn't needed for daily operations.
Focus on these three criteria when identifying archive candidates:
- Age: Older than two years
- Access frequency: Not viewed in the last six months
- Business relevance: No longer needed in active workflows
Good candidates include completed projects, closed opportunities beyond your analysis period, historical customer interactions, and resolved cases that exceed your standard retention timeline.
Your archiving strategy needs a structured framework that balances optimization with operational requirements. Start by classifying information based on importance levels:
- Critical records: must remain immediately accessible,
- Important entries: can tolerate slightly longer retrieval times
- Historical content: rarely accessed but must be retained
Define clear retrieval requirements for each category, including acceptable timeframes for restoration and the circumstances that would trigger archive access.
Build Compliance into Your Archive Plan
Every industry has different retention requirements, and your solution must maintain integrity and comply with them. Document these requirements clearly and verify your chosen method can demonstrate compliance when auditors review your systems.
7. Compress or Offload Large Files
Large files consume your Salesforce file allocation faster than most other types, so compressing or offloading them can help you preserve space and avoid hitting allocation limits.
Start by identifying your biggest consumers:
- Go to Setup → Storage Usage
- Create a custom report on the ContentDocument object
- Sort by ContentSize (descending) to see the biggest files
Compress What You Can
Image files offer the easiest wins for compression:
- Use tools like TinyPNG or Adobe’s built-in compression features
- Shrink image sizes by 60–80% before upload with minimal quality loss
- For PDFs, use compression tools like Smallpdf or settings in your PDF software
- Skip high resolution unless it’s absolutely necessary
Offload When Possible
Avoid storing large files as direct Salesforce attachments. Instead, use:
- Salesforce Content Delivery: Offers better performance and more granular sharing controls. Content files use the platform's content distribution network, improving load times for users across locations while using the same footprint more efficiently.
- External storage integrations: SharePoint, Google Drive, Box, etc. Store documents externally and maintain links within Salesforce records. In that way, you preserve workflow functionality and reduce consumption. The integration maintains user experience while shifting costs to more economical platforms.
Don’t Forget Mobile Users
Consider mobile users and offline access when implementing offloading strategies. Files kept externally won't be available offline through the Salesforce mobile app, so evaluate which documents truly need mobile accessibility before moving them off-platform.
Balance optimization with user productivity to avoid creating workflow friction while managing costs.
8. Avoid Expensive Salesforce Storage Limit Add-Ons (When Possible)
Salesforce charges $25 per month for every additional 1GB of data storage and $125 per month for every additional 500MB of file storage. These costs compound annually, making a 10GB increase cost $3,000–$15,000 per year, depending on your type mix.
Before committing to those recurring expenses, walk through this decision framework:
- Estimate cleanup ROI: Multiply your team’s cleanup time by their hourly rate. If the one-time effort costs less than six months of additional storage fees, optimization is the smarter path.
- Assess record usage: Are your heavy records driving daily operations, or are they dormant?
- Question historical value: Data that hasn’t been touched in over a year rarely justifies premium Salesforce pricing.
When evaluating, also ask yourself this question: Would a third-party archiving solution deliver better long-term economics? While Salesforce capacity provides convenience, it lacks advanced management capabilities that specialized platforms offer.
Adding additional storage space in Salesforce typically takes 24–48 hours, but creates permanent recurring costs that scale with your organization without addressing underlying management inefficiencies.
9. Define and Document Data Retention Policies
Create a formal retention policy that prevents future bloat. Define clear criteria for what information to keep, retention periods, and deletion triggers that align with compliance requirements and business needs.
Document your archive retrieval processes, including step-by-step restoration procedures and personnel responsible for archive management. This documentation becomes invaluable during audits or emergency recovery situations, as it enables your team to quickly access archived content when business needs arise.
Once your retention policy is in place, reinforce it with practical rules that shape how users store and manage files day-to-day:
- Create validation rules or custom components that enforce reasonable upload limits
- Train users on compression techniques and alternative options
- Define clear guidelines for when files belong in Salesforce versus external systems
- Base decisions on access frequency and business importance
These guardrails reduce the risk of unmanageable file growth and help your team make smarter, faster decisions about what belongs in your Salesforce environment.
10. Automate Your Data Management with the Right Tools
Automation transforms management from a time-consuming manual process into a proactive system. Rather than dedicating hours each week to monitoring and maintenance, establish automated workflows that handle routine tasks while providing intelligent insights about storage and data patterns.
Modern data management platforms deliver automation across all important areas:
- Automated audits: Scheduled scans generate detailed reports that flag trends, usage spikes, and cleanup opportunities before they cause issues
- Composite Backup technology: Captures only changed records during backups, cutting storage overhead while ensuring complete protection
- Smart archiving: Analyzes access patterns and automatically moves low-use data into cost-efficient tiers based on business rules
This maintains accessibility while reducing your primary footprint. When you need archived information, granular restoration processes provide precise control over what gets restored and where.
The automated workflow begins with an initial setup that maps your retention policies and compliance requirements. Once configured, the system:
- Continuously monitors your environment
- Executes predefined actions based on your criteria
- Delivers summary reports and alerts only when intervention is needed
- Frees your team to focus on strategic initiatives rather than housekeeping
Security and compliance remain paramount throughout automated processes. Role-based access controls, BYOK, and comprehensive audit logs verify that management meets regulatory requirements, including FedRAMP, GDPR, and HIPAA standards.
You also have the flexibility to deploy automation in the way that best suits your organization, whether through a hosted solution, integration with your cloud infrastructure, or a fully on-premises setup.
Don't Let Salesforce Storage Limits Limit Your Growth
When you manage storage proactively, Salesforce stops being something you have to fix and starts working the way it’s supposed to. The strategies we mentioned can help you save space and:
- Speed up your system by clearing out clutter
- Save serious money by avoiding emergency storage buys
- Stay compliant without scrambling during audits
If you wait until you're getting warning emails or people can’t upload files, it's already too late. That’s when you end up making rushed decisions, paying for more space you don’t need, or spending your weekend manually deleting old records.
Teams that stay ahead of the problem build a system around smart retention policies, regular cleanup, and automation that handles the busywork. And that’s exactly what Flosum Backup & Archive is built for.
Flosum runs right inside Salesforce. It backs up only what’s changed (so you’re not wasting space), gives you instant recovery when things go sideways, and automatically moves old data to affordable storage—without losing access when you need it. It keeps your org clean, secure, and running fast, so you don't have to micromanage every record.
If that sounds like a better way to work, let’s talk.
