Salesforce data archiving: what history to keep before you purge

What history should a Salesforce org keep before it archives or purges?

Keep whatever the company's tax, legal and contract obligations require, and before purging anything else, have the owner decide whether the history has other value. Orgs run into storage limits, and the usual fixes are deleting old activities, closing out ancient cases and moving closed opportunities to an external archive. Each of those removes records that, in aggregate, show years of real sales and service work. A short owner conversation before the purge costs little and cannot be repeated once the data is gone.

This guide is for Salesforce admins and consultants. It shows how to flag the question without touching the records yourself. The broader partner picture is in the page for Salesforce consulting partners, and referral opportunities for CRM consultants covers the wider channel.

Why storage pressure creates a window

Storage reviews force a list of what is old, large and rarely used. That list is exactly the long-tail history that gives a CRM its depth.

Do not rely on this table to judge value. Value comes from linkage and outcomes, and only the company and SourceX can assess it.

Prerequisites

• You know who in the client company owns the CRM decision (often the sales or operations leader) and who can authorize a license (owner, CEO, CFO or authorized representative).
• The client has 50+ full-time employees at peak (contractors excluded) and several years of documented operations.
• Your contract and partner agreements allow introductions and any related compensation.
• You can describe the org in terms of years, objects and surrounding systems, without opening or quoting any record.

Step by step: a purge-safe flag

1. Get the retention requirement first. Ask the client's counsel or tax adviser what must be kept. That sets the floor.
2. List what the purge would remove. Record the age and rough volume of each object class, not the contents.
3. Pause irreversible deletes. If the owner has not yet weighed the history, ask for the purge to wait until they have. Archiving to external storage, rather than deleting, keeps options open.
4. Check surrounding systems. The CRM history is far more valuable alongside email, support, finance and shared drives. The ERP discovery questionnaire has questions that reveal how far back the other systems go.
5. Take the question to the sponsor. Do not pitch the admin; the owner, CEO or CFO decides.
6. Introduce. Send the owner your referral link, which opens sourcex.si/apply with your partner code attached, or submit the referral form.
7. Step back. SourceX qualifies the company; the company completes an inventory with SourceX; redaction requirements are agreed before any work begins.

What to say to the owner

Send the same message in writing afterwards, so the client has a record that the question was raised and the decision was theirs.

Archive, purge or assess: a decision rule

This is a planning aid, not advice. The client's own advisers set retention obligations.

Common mistakes

Who else should hear about the purge?

Storage decisions rarely belong to one person. Before the purge date, ask which of these roles has a stake, and let the sponsor bring them in.

• The head of sales, who may rely on old opportunity history for forecasting.
• The head of support, who may need old cases for repeat-issue lookups.
• Legal or the outside counsel, who set retention holds.
• The CFO, who is usually the person who can authorize a license.

If a litigation hold or audit request is open, do not touch the affected records at all.

Illustrative example

Illustrative and fictional: a 150-person logistics software company is told its Salesforce org is near its storage limit. The admin proposes deleting activities older than four years and closing out old cases. Before it runs, the consultant asks the COO whether anyone has considered the history as an asset. The COO asks for an introduction and the purge is paused for a few weeks while the company decides. The consultant never sees an activity record.

How rewards work

Partners earn 25% of the eligible platform fees SourceX actually collects from the referred company's licensing deals, capped at $100,000 cumulative per referred company. The reward becomes payable only after the buyer pays and SourceX receives its fee. The reward is a share of SourceX's fee and is never deducted from what the company receives. Rewards are not guaranteed. The signed agreement and the program terms govern the details.

Related reading

For the question of why buyers want this kind of record, read why AI data demand keeps growing. Archives left after infrastructure moves are covered in cloud migration legacy data, and companies in distress should read keeping IT systems running in an ABC or receivership, where trustees or assignees may control assets. For managed-service practices, see additional revenue streams for MSPs. The baseline is on who qualifies.

Next step

Flag the orgs in your book that are approaching storage limits using the network opportunity finder, then register as a partner to get your referral link.