With Field Audit Trail, you can define a policy to retain archived
field history data. This feature helps you comply with industry regulations related to audit
capability and data retention.
Async SOQL is scheduled for retirement in all Salesforce orgs as of Summer
’23.
| Available in: Salesforce Classic (not available in all orgs),
Lightning Experience, and the Salesforce mobile app |
| 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 for fields that have field history tracking enabled. 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 big object. 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. Then use Metadata API to deploy your policy. You can update the retention
policy on an object as often as needed. With Field Audit Trail, you can track up to 60
fields per object. Without it, you can track only 20 fields per object. With Field Audit
Trail, archived field history data is stored until you manually delete it. You can manually
delete data that falls outside of your policy window.
Field history
tracking data and Field Audit Trail data don’t count against your data storage
limits.
You can set field history retention policies on these objects.
- Accounts, including Person Accounts
- Assets
- Campaigns
- Cases
- Contacts
- Contracts
- Contract Line Items
- Crisis
- Employee
- Employee Crisis Assessment
- Entitlements
- Individuals
- Internal Organization Unit
- Leads
- Opportunities
- Orders
- Order Products
- Price Books
- Price Book Entries
- Products
- Service Appointments
- Service Contracts
- Solutions
- Work Orders
- Work Order Line Items
- Custom objects with field history tracking enabled
When Field Audit Trail is enabled, HistoryRetentionPolicy is automatically set on the supported objects. By
default, data is archived after 18 months in production, after one month in sandboxes, and
all archived data is stored until you manually delete it. The default retention policy isn’t
included when retrieving the object’s definition through Metadata API. Only custom retention
policies are retrieved along with the object definition.
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 big 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. If you delete a record in your
production data, the delete cascades to the associated history tracking records, but the
history copied into the FieldHistoryArchive big object
isn’t deleted. To delete data in FieldHistoryArchive,
see Delete Field History and Field Audit Trail Data.
Use Async SOQL to build aggregate reports from a custom object based on the volume of the
data in the FieldHistoryArchive big object.
If you enable Platform Encryption in your org and use Field Audit
Trail to track encrypted fields, there are limitations on using Async SOQL. In particular,
using Async SOQL to query the NewValue or
OldValue fields of the FieldHistoryArchive big object isn’t supported. Use SOQL to query both
encrypted and unencrypted NewValue and OldValue
fields of FieldHistoryArchive.
Previously archived data remains unencrypted if you turn on Platform
Encryption later. 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 and previous updates stored in the
Account History related list are encrypted. However, phone number history data that is
already archived in the FieldHistoryArchive object
remains stored without encryption. If your organization wants to encrypt previously
archived data, contact Salesforce. We encrypt and rearchive the stored field history data,
then delete the unencrypted archive.
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