Salesforce Winter ’12 Release has some changes to the Salesforce Recycle Bin that you should be aware of. But before we discuss these lets briefly review how Recycle Bin works.
The Salesforce Recycle Bin link lives at the bottom of your Sidebar and allows you to retrieve records that you deleted in Salesforce. The link brings you to the Salesforce Recycle Bin page. By default, the page is sorted with the last deleted record on the top but you can change the sort order by clicking on the different column headers.
Administrators and users with the “Modify All Data” permission can use the “All Recycle Bin” view to see all deleted records. Admin users start with the “My Recycle Bin” view and non-admin users will only have this view. You can use the “Search” box to quickly find what you are looking for. Searches look for matches in the field displayed in the Name column of the Salesforce Recycle Bin such as Lead Name, Case Number, Contract Number, or Product Name.
You can use the “Action” column along with the “Undelete” button to restore single or multiple records at a time. Most relationships, like Parent Account, or lookup fields, are restored as well.
You can use the “Empty your recycle bin” (or “Empty your organization’s recycle bin” for admins) button to clear all records.
Record Retention
The recycle bin retention period has been lowered from 30 days to 15 days. After 15 days in the recycle bin, the record is permanently deleted.
- If you find yourself deleting records on a regular basis, you may want to set yourself a reoccurring task to check your Salesforce Recycle Bin every two weeks or so.
- You can also use the Weekly or Monthly Export (depending on your Salesforce version) to ensure you have backups of your data.
Record Limit
The Salesforce Recycle Bin record limit has been reduced from 250 times your storage to 25 times your storage. So if your organization has 1GB of storage, then your recycle bin limit is 25 times 1000MB or about 25,000 records.
Once your organization reaches the limit, oldest records are permanently deleted if they have been in the recycle bin for at least 2 hours.
- This limit should not be an issue for most companies but if you are running automated deletions, or you frequently do mass deletes through the interface, the data Loader, or the API, you could find you company running into this limit.
- For automated deletions, you may want to look at using the “Bulk API Hard Delete” permission but be careful as any records deleted this way bypass the recycle bin and are permanently deleted.
The Salesforce Recycle Bin can be quite helpful in recovering accidentally deleted records but pay attention to the new limits.
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