Where Did My Salesforce Activities Go?

Did you know: Salesforce automatically “archives” Tasks after 365 days?

I recently encountered this phenomenon a few weeks ago when a client asked me to help reduce the number of Tasks in their instance to comply with Salesforce Data Storage limits. Setup > Data Management > Storage Usage was telling me there were over 2 million Tasks in the system, but a Tasks and Events Report was conversely only yielding 9ook records. For a few minutes, I was baffled, bewildered and befuddled, until my good friend Google led me to the Salesforce Documentation article that describes all About Archived Activities. Events and Closed Tasks that were due more than 365 days ago are automatically archived, in addition to Closed Tasks without a due date that were created more than 365 days ago.

Since archived Tasks are not visible via a Report, you need to call on the Data Loader (LexiLoader for Mac users) and perform an Export All on Task records in order to get a list of all archived Tasks.

Now that we’ve exported all of the Tasks (including the archived ones), it’s time to think about removing the Tasks from the system and clearing up some of that data storage space. While you technically could delete 500 records at a time utilizing Salesforce’s standard “Mass Delete” functionality, I recommend saving yourself some clicks and using Mass Delete with the Data Loader. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to delete Salesforce records using the Data Loader from the Dallas based Company ShellBlack.

To ensure that you don’t end up in this situation again, make sure to check the integration settings with your Marketing Automation system. Most MA systems will give you the ability to select which types of Tasks you want to automatically insert into Salesforce. Be very wary of inserting Email Sends and Email Opens, as they are typically the key culprit in Task overload situations. My preference is to not sync any tasks into Salesforce – instead use the Marketing Automation Visualforce Page (like Sales Insight) to serve that data up directly to the Sales user without impacting any storage capacity.

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