Salesforce storage is notoriously expensive. When your org creeps toward its quota limit or a single object crosses a million records, performance tanks and massive overage bills arrive.
The traditional fix? Manual cleanup: export a few messy CSVs, delete records, and cross your fingers hoping you didn't just break a critical dependency.
Spoiler alert: it doesn't scale.
Rubrik Salesforce Archiving is the systematic alternative. It safely moves inactive records out of production Salesforce and into durable, lower-cost storage. This approach permanently frees up your quota and keeps everything searchable and restorable on demand. And with the Salesforce Lightning component, end users can view archived records right inside Salesforce, no IT ticket, no switching tools.
Here is a look at how it works under the hood.
Backup Protects, Archiving Manages
Archiving is not a backup. While backup protects you against accidental data loss, archiving actively manages your data lifecycle. It moves the data you no longer need out of high-cost storage so you can permanently free up quota.
Before configuring a policy, start with one question: what's actually eating your storage? Here are two key data types that can quietly fill up your data stores:
- Records and their related data: Think about all of those closed Opportunities piling up for years, or old Cases with all their child EmailMessages and attachments. You want all of this gone from Salesforce.
- Files and attachments only: Your Cases or Contracts are still active and need to stay in Salesforce, but the attachments linked to them are ballooning your file storage quota. Archive the files, leave the records.
The Policy Engine: Set It and Forget It
Policies target records using a SOQL driven query. You can select any standard or custom object, define your conditions (date ranges, field values, custom logic), and Rubrik identifies exactly which records to archive. From there, choose what to move:
- Records and their files and attachments: This archives the full record along with all associated files and attachments. Use this when inactive records are hurting org performance or consuming record storage.
- Files and attachments only: This archives the files and attachments for matching records while leaving the records themselves in Salesforce. Use this when records need to stay accessible but bloated attachments are driving up file storage costs. For example, Cases accumulating years of email attachments or Contracts with heavy document histories.
- When to run it: Every policy supports on-demand runs so you can trigger it manually at any time for a one-off archive job, useful for validating a new policy or running an ad-hoc cleanup. Or configure a recurring schedule (daily, weekly, or monthly) so the policy fires automatically and continuously sweeps up records as they age into your criteria.
- Purge policy: Data doesn't have to live in the archive indefinitely. Each policy includes a configurable retention period. Once that window closes, archived records are automatically and permanently deleted from the archive. Records are protected from deletion before the retention period expires, so compliance teams can trust the data is there for exactly as long as required, and no longer.
Uncomfortable writing SOQL? Don't sweat it. Rubrik AI assistant can generate a query from a plain-English description. Plus, there's an inline Estimate Number of Records button to run a read-only count against the org before you activate anything.
Restore with Total Fidelity
Need your data back? You can trigger a restore right from the Archive Catalog or directly from an individual Record View.
Flexible Restore Scope: When pulling back archived records with related children, admins can choose the exact depth needed:
Root records only: Restores just the selected parent records without their archived children.
Root + related records: Restores the full archived record graph at the exact traversal depth captured at archive time.
The system even shows you the exact record counts for each option before you hit confirm.
Bulletproof Dry Run Validation: To make sure nothing breaks, Rubrik runs a mandatory read-only check for bulk restores of 100+ records (it's optional for single records). Before a single write executes, you get a detailed validation report showing:
- The count of records to be inserted, skipped, or overwritten per object type.
- Relationship warnings for child records whose parent lookup IDs do not currently exist in the target org.
- Estimated Salesforce API calls required compared to your remaining daily limit.
Seamless File Restores: When restoring a ContentDocument, Salesforce automatically re-creates the ContentVersion. Rubrik restores the ContentDocumentLink to ensure your records and files stay connected rather than restored but disconnected. If you only archived files, your entry point in the Archive Catalog is simply the ContentDocument.