If you are a Salesforce administrator or user of salesforce, we are always questioned on how much data storage do we need further to store our records?  What would be the approximate cost we need to budget for data storage? I devised an excel based data calculator which would help to calculate how much data storage would you need if you plan a data migration project and also forecast for the future.

Storage needed for data migration

If you are planning to migrate an existing database or application to Salesforce, you would like to plan for data storage capacity needed in salesforce and cost associated with it. Here are the basic facts which you need to know about data storage.

1. Every record in standard and custom object stores 2 KB of storage in salesforce.

2. Person accounts consume 4 KB of data storage.

3. Campaign object consumes 8 KB of data storage.

The data migration calculator sheet would help you to project the storage needed for your custom objects, person accounts and other types of objects. The rows highlighted in green would help you calculate the projected cost salesforce would charge for data storage which is 1200$ approximately.

Data Storage Forecasting

To plan for how much data storage you would need for the future say 3 to 5 years, the Datastorage forecaster sheet would help you to forecast the price and storage needed. Please feel free to enter the number of years and expected growth of records in percentage. The calculator would compute the projected cost and storage.

Tips to conserve space.

1. If you are doing a data migration project, cleaning the data and doing a deduping would help to prevent unwanted duplicate records.

2. Create a baseline for the date you would like to extract the data from the source application like a date which would limit the number of records.

3. Also, make rules for bad data like lead records with no contact information, contact records with no confirmation, opportunities with no price and stage etc which would limit bad data entering salesforce.

To get the calculator, Please feel free to send me an email at buyan@eigenx.com