Field Audit Trail lets you define a policy to retain archived field
history data up to ten years, independent of field history tracking. This feature helps you
comply with industry regulations related to audit capability and data
retention.
| Available in: Salesforce Classic |
| Available in: Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited
Editions |
| To specify a field history retention policy: |
Retain Field History |
Use Salesforce
Metadata API to define a retention policy
for your field history. Then use REST API, SOAP API, and Tooling API to work with your archived
data. For information about enabling Field Audit Trail, contact your Salesforce representative.
Field history is copied from the History related list into the FieldHistoryArchive object and then deleted from the History
related list. You define one HistoryRetentionPolicy for your related history lists, such as Account History, to specify Field
Audit Trail retention policies for the objects that you want to archive. You can then deploy
the object by using the Metadata API (Workbench or Force Migration Tool). You can update the
retention policy on an object as often as you like.
You can set field history retention policies on the following objects.
- Accounts
- Cases
- Contacts
- Leads
- Opportunities
- Assets
- Entitlements
- Service Contracts
- Contract Line Items
- Solutions
- Products
- Price Books
- Custom objects with field history tracking enabled
The HistoryRetentionPolicy is automatically set on the above objects, once Field Audit Trail is enabled.
By default, data is archived after 18 months in a production organization, after one month
in a sandbox organization, and all archived data is stored for 10 years.
You can include field history retention policies in managed and unmanaged packages.
The following fields can't be tracked.
- Formula, roll-up summary, or auto-number fields
- Created By and Last Modified By
- Expected Revenue field on opportunities
- Master Solution Title or the Master Solution Details fields on solutions
- Long text fields
- Multi-select fields
After you define and deploy a Field Audit Trail policy, production data is
migrated from related history lists such as Account History into the
FieldHistoryArchive object. The first copy writes the field
history that’s defined by your policy to archive storage and sometimes takes a long time.
Subsequent copies transfer only the changes since the last copy and are much faster. A
bounded set of SOQL is available to query your archived data.
For some time after the
initial GA release, data might not be automatically deleted from the History related list
and may reside in both the FieldHistoryArchive object and in the History related list. Salesforce reserves the right to delete
archived data from the History related list in accordance with the customer-defined policy
in future releases.
If your organization has Field Audit Trail enabled, previously archived
data isn't encrypted if you subsequently turn on Platform Encryption. For example, your
organization uses Field Audit Trail to define a data history retention policy for an
account field, such as the phone number field. After enabling Platform Encryption, you
turn on encryption for that field, and phone number data in the account is encrypted. New
phone number records are encrypted as they are created, and previous updates to the phone
number field that are stored in the Account History related list are also encrypted.
However, phone number history data that is already archived in the FieldHistoryArchive object continues to be stored without
encryption. If your organization needs to encrypt previously archived data, contact Salesforce. We will encrypt and rearchive the
stored field history data, then delete the unencrypted archive.
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