SALESFORCE SANDBOX SEEDING

Test with confidence. Release without fear.

Seed realistic test data easily, and find issues before they reach production

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Build and test with data you can trust

Testing without realistic data leads to false positives and missed bugs. Sandbox Seeding gives you production-accurate test data in your dev sandboxes, so you can shift left, catch issues early, and deploy with confidence.

Deploy data in minutes, not hours

Understand your data before you seed it

Visualize parent-child dependencies at a glance and see how many related records will come along

Keep automations under control

Automatically disable triggers, flows, and validation rules during seeding to prevent real-world actions and deployment failures.

Speed up the whole team

Save seeding configurations as reusable templates so anyone can seed a sandbox in minutes.

Only seed what matters

Cover every test scenario

Filter records by field and value to build targeted datasets that cover everything from happy paths to edge cases.

Find real bugs, not data problems

Seed production data that reflects your org’s true complexity and eliminate false positives

​​Stay within storage limits

Preview your sandbox storage availability and see exactly how many records you’ll seed before you commit.

Built for security and compliance

Compliance-ready by default

Meet GDPR and CCPA requirements with built-in PII masking and a complete audit trail of every data migration

Speed up full and partial copy refreshes

Use in-place masking to quickly anonymize data after a sandbox refresh and get your team back to testing faster

Your data stays secure

Data moves directly between your orgs using encrypted connections, never touching Gearset’s servers.

Giving credit where due: I had to move data from production to a developer org this week. The relationships were plenty and I couldn’t fathom doing it manually 1 file at a time. Thanks to Gearset the data migration was easy breezy including anonymizing sensitive data!

Joshua Hoskins

Technical Product & Delivery Architect
CRMified

CRMified

Proven results from real teams

Granicus

Learn how Granicus used Gearset to revolutionize their Salesforce DevOps process and achieve tangible results.

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Fluence

Learn how Fluence used Gearset to revolutionize their Salesforce DevOps process and achieve tangible results.

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The complete Salesforce DevOps platform

When your tests run on real-world data, you deploy to production without the stress. Our Salesforce Sandbox Seeding solution is part of a complete DevOps platform: seed sandboxes, deploy metadata, automate testing, manage releases with Pipelines, and protect your org with backup and archiving, all from one place.

Explore full platform

Learn more about Sandbox Seeding

Help docs

Getting started with Sandbox Seeding and Compliance

Discover how to seed, stay compliant, and develop with confidence

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Help docs

Configuring & running your first Sandbox Seeding job

Step-by-step guide to selecting objects, filtering, masking, and deploying data

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Running your first in-place masking

How to anonymise sensitive fields directly within a sandbox org

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Sandbox seeding FAQs

Sandbox seeding is the process of populating a Salesforce sandbox with production data for testing and development. Rather than manually creating test records or relying on mock data, seeding copies real records — including complex relationships and dependencies — into lower environments, giving development teams and QA testers realistic data to work with. Gearset’s Sandbox Seeding solution streamlines this process with built-in data masking, automated dependency mapping, and reusable templates.

Refreshing a Salesforce sandbox creates a new copy of your production org’s metadata and (depending on sandbox type) some or all production data. Seeding processes happen after a refresh and let you selectively add specific data sets to sandbox environments — especially useful for developer sandboxes that don’t automatically include production data. Seeding gives you control over which data, how much data, and which data relationships get copied into test environments.

Salesforce offers four sandbox types: Developer, Developer Pro, Partial Copy, and Full Copy. Sandbox seeding is particularly valuable for Developer and Developer Pro sandboxes, which include metadata but no data, meaning teams need to manually populate them with test data. It’s also useful for Partial Copy sandboxes where the sampled data may not cover all the scenarios your team needs to test.

Gearset Sandbox Seeding is built with data privacy in mind – it automatically anonymizes sensitive data and personally identifiable information (PII) during the seeding job, based on your configuration. You can configure data masking rules to de-identify data across standard and custom fields, ensuring sensitive production data stays protected and you maintain regulatory compliance with privacy laws like GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA. This prevents sensitive information from being exposed in test environments while maintaining realistic data patterns for testing.

Yes. One of the biggest post-refresh pain points is manually anonymizing sensitive production data in full copy sandboxes. Gearset’s in-place masking automates this process, letting you mask PII and sensitive information across millions of records in under an hour. Instead of spending days on manual data masking or running slow custom Apex jobs, you can complete your post-refresh activities quickly and get your sandbox environments ready for testing while maintaining regulatory compliance.

Yes, sandbox storage limits depend on your Salesforce sandbox type. Gearset shows you available sandbox data storage while you configure your seeding job. This helps you avoid exceeding sandbox storage limits and prevents storage based errors during the seeding process. You can filter and adjust your data selection to fit within your available capacity.

Gearset moves Salesforce data directly between your production environments and sandbox environments using encrypted connections, so there is no need to ever store your data on our servers. All data security is maintained through direct org-to-org transfers with automatic field-level anonymization applied during transit.

No. Gearset can disable triggers, flows, validation rules, and other automations during the seeding process to prevent test failures, avoid human error, and stop real-world actions (like emails) from firing. Automations are re-enabled after the seeding job completes.

No. Sandbox Seeding is designed for development teams, QA teams, admins, and non-technical users. Not only is the tool intuitive to use, thanks to its visual user interface, it also allows your team to configure reusable templates that let anyone on your team run a seeding job with a few clicks – no deep Salesforce knowledge required. This makes it easy to populate developer sandbox environments or prepare multiple objects for testing without manual seeding or using CSV files.

Yes. Gearset automatically visualizes data relationships and dependencies between objects (including custom objects and standard Salesforce objects). When you select objects for your seeding strategy, Gearset shows you all related parent-child relationships and ensures data integrity is maintained across large datasets. This includes handling lookup relationships, master-detail relationships, and dependencies across multiple objects without duplicate records.

Sandbox Seeding is our latest purpose-built workflow, designed to streamline the everyday seeding patterns most teams use daily. It should be your go-to for keeping sandboxes test-ready. Data Deployments hasn’t gone anywhere though –  it’s still fully available for advanced use cases like config data deployments and seeding from non-related orgs. Both are included in the Sandbox Seeding & Compliance add-on.

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