Salesforce Sandbox Types

SANDBOX TYPES:

There are four types of Sandboxes: Developer Sandbox, Developer Pro Sandbox, Partial Copy Sandbox, and Full Sandbox. Sandbox environments are through Salesforce.

Only Full Sandbox refreshes will allow all data, including plans, qualifiers, and mappings, to copy over. Having a Developer Sandbox updates the Express version and pulls over rep information, but not plans or mappings. See Setting Up Express in a Developer Sandbox for more information on updating Developer Sandboxes.

Developer Sandbox:

Developer sandboxes are intended for coding and testing in an isolated environment. These environments include a copy of your production organization’s configuration (metadata).

Developer Pro Sandbox:

Developer Pro sandboxes are intended for coding and testing in an isolated environment. These environments include a copy of your production organization’s configuration (metadata). They have a larger storage limit than Developer sandboxes. The larger limit allows for more robust test data sets and enables this environment to handle more development and quality assurance tasks.

Partial Copy Sandbox:

Partial Copy sandboxes are intended to be used as testing environments. These environments can be used for quality assurance tasks such as user acceptance testing, integration testing, and training. These environments include a copy of your production organization’s configuration (metadata), and a subset of your production data as defined by a sandbox template. 

Full Sandbox:

Full sandboxes are intended to be used as testing environments. Only Full sandboxes support performance testing, load testing, and staging. These environments are a replica of your production organization, including all data—for example, object records and attachments—and metadata. The length of the refresh interval makes it difficult to use Full sandboxes for development. When you create a Full sandbox, you also have to decide how many fields tracking history and Chatter activity to include.

• The default is to omit field tracking, but you can include up to 180 days of field tracking. Specify fewer days to avoid generating an excessive amount of data if you track field history for many objects in your production organization.
• Chatter activity data can be extensive, which can add a significant amount of time to your Full sandbox copy.

Limit the amount of field history that you copy, and copy your Chatter data only if you need it for your testing use cases.

(Salesforce Support. Sandboxes)