Salesforce CRM - The Definitive Admin Handbook - Fourth Edition

Best practices for mass data updating

When carrying out any kind of mass data update or deletion in Salesforce CRM, you should ensure that the data to be changed is correct, but you should also consider applying the following best practices.

Back up data

Back up your data before performing a mass update, or delete it by either requesting a data export or exporting your own report of the data.

Test batch

Create a test file containing a few records first to ensure that your source data has been correctly prepared.

Tip

Mass deleting data:

Consider including both the Date/Time Stamp and Created by Alias criteria in your mass delete to ensure that you are only deleting your imports and no other data.