Starting with the Spring ‘19 release (1), Salesforce will enforce the retention limit for Field History Data. With this release, Salesforce will begin the process of removing field history data older than 24 months. B2B Marketers and Sales professionals are required to act promptly and swiftly if they wish to maintain their older Salesforce data. It is important to note that Field History Data are available for up to 18 months through orgs, and up to 24 months via Data Loader or the API. B2B Marketing and Sales organizations who would like to access and retain their data older than two years have following two options available:
- Purchase FAT (Field Audit Trail) – It lets organizations define a policy to retain archived field history data up to 10 years from the time the data were archived.
- Download – Download their data and add that data to a custom big object. In this case, the organization can either use Data Loader or the queryAll() API to retrieve old field history and then add it to a big object.
The field history retention policy applies on the following objects:
- Accounts
- Articles
- Assets
- Campaigns
- Cases
- Contacts
- Contracts
- Contract line items
- Entitlements
- Leads
- Opportunities
- Orders
- Order Products
- Products
- Service Contracts
- Solutions
- Custom objects with field history tracking enabled
The following fields cannot be tracked:
- Formula, roll-up summary, or auto-number fields
- Created By and Last Modified By
- Expected Revenue field on opportunities
- Master Solution Title or the Master Solution Details fields on solutions
- Long text fields
- Multi-select fields
Important notes:
- Salesforce orgs created before June 1, 2011 are exempt from this change.
- Once Salesforce removes data, organizations cannot use the getDeleted() API to retrieve it.
- For data older than 24 months, action must be taken before the Spring ‘19 release.
- Those using both business accounts and personal accounts need to be aware of the following:
- Field history tracking for accounts applies to both business and personal accounts, so the 20-field maximum includes both types of accounts.
- Changes made directly to a personal contact record are not tracked by field history.
RightWave can assist B2B organizations in data retention for Salesforce as well as popular Marketing Automation Systems including Eloqua, Marketo, and Pardot. For more information, contact RightWave.
Reference:
(1) Baizman, Mark: “Admin Release Countdown: Get Ready for Spring ’19!”, Salesforce Admins, December 11, 2018. https://admin.salesforce.com/admin-release-countdown-get-ready-for-spring-19
