Finding and exporting your Salesforce data

What it holds

Accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities, cases, tasks and events hold structured business history, including custom fields. Files, attachments, documents and content versions occupy separate file storage; archived records can also be retained.

Where Salesforce shows the size

1. Enter Setup using a System Administrator account.
2. Search Quick Find for Storage Usage and open the result.
3. Review data and file usage, then inspect the record-type breakdown and counts; keep file GB separate from record totals.

Plan and admin role. Storage Usage is available through Setup. Data Export requires Weekly Data Export, assigned by default only to the System Administrator profile.

Exporting the full history

1. Find Data Export through Setup > Quick Find.
2. Select Export Now when available, or Schedule Export for recurring delivery.
3. Choose encoding and enable both attachments/documents/images and Salesforce Files/CRM Content versions if required.
4. Select Include all data and submit the request.
5. Download every emailed ZIP within 48 hours; queuing a new export also removes the prior files.

Enterprise, Performance and Unlimited permit seven-day intervals; other supported editions, including Professional and Developer, use 29 days or monthly scheduling. Database.com is unsupported.

ZIPs are usually around 512 MB, although a file up to 2 GB can yield a larger archive. Large jobs may take over a week, with no completion SLA.

Standard export includes active and archived records but omits Recycle Bin items, formula fields and roll-up summaries. Binary files require the relevant options.

Data Loader Export All can include soft-deleted rows: Bulk API supports up to 5 million records, or 150 million with Bulk API 2.0.

You don't need to run an export to talk to us, and there's no need to clean it first — removing personal data is part of our work.