Every Admin's worst nightmare - running out of Salesforce storage. The dreaded conversation with your CIO to convince them that you need to purchase more space. Depending on your type of Salesforce usage, hitting the limits of storage capacity can come much quicker than one might think, particularly if you’re saving a lot of heavy files like images and PDFs.
How Much Storage Comes with My Salesforce?
Each Salesforce implementation of every edition gets a standard 10 GB of file storage. Depending on your edition, there are also scaling file storage options that increase incrementally with the number of active Salesforce licenses you have and the number of users X 2 GB for production orgs. Note that this is counted separately from regular data storage, which also varies based on the number of users in your organization.
If you are using Experience or Community Cloud, your licenses will not include any file storage. Regardless of what type of storage limits you have, if you’re storing images as files, you might be surprised how quickly you can hit a wall. To give a concrete example, 2000 photos constitute 10 GB of storage, so depending on your use case, you can arrive at the limit reasonably fast.
If you go beyond these parameters, you’ll encounter the error message “STORAGE_LIMIT_EXCEEDED.” In this case, your Salesforce will continue to work, but it will experience a downgrade in performance.
What are the Solutions to the STORAGE_LIMIT_EXCEEDED Error Message?
If you encounter the error message pointing to your storage usage being too high, one solution is just to purchase more storage. The best way to do this is to get in touch with your account representative, who will talk you through your options.
A good practice is to monitor your storage usage constantly and delete outdated data so you don’t get surprised with an error message that causes your performance to downgrade. But there are a few other actions you can take if you encounter an error message about the storage limit being exceeded. For example:
- Delete older files from your Salesforce (of course, accepting the risk that you may be deleting a file that you might need again in the future)
- Use an external storage system, separated from your Salesforce, to offload files. This can be Google Drive, Box, or many others. The risk here is that you’ll need to juggle access rights between Salesforce and that secondary storage option
- Use an integrated solution to offload heavy file storage with a seamless connection to Salesforce (SharinPix is a good partner to fill this need; more on that later)
Is There a Better Way to Store Images and Documents in Salesforce?
If you take a tour of the Salesforce AppExchange, you might find SharinPix, the original image app for Salesforce. SharinPix has more than 30 lightning components that will allow you to upload, view, edit, annotate, resize, crop, watermark, and more - all without leaving Salesforce.
On top of that SharinPix has a companion mobile app that will ease the capture and subsequent direct upload of photos to your Salesforce records.
But what about storage?
The great news is that SharinPix licenses come with unlimited image and document storage!
How Does SharinPix Offer Unlimted Image and Document Storage?
Solving Salesforce storage limits is one of our biggest goals at SharinPix. We are happy to provide unlimited storage at no extra cost when you buy one of our licenses. Our components safely store your data on an Amazon S3 server, where they will always be quickly, easily retrievable, and viewable for your business needs.
If you’re curious about our safety standards when it comes to storing your files outside the Salesforce ecosystem, we encourage you to read our article, which is dedicated to all of the security measures we have in place. You can find it here:
Ready to Unblock the Salesforce Limits on Image Storage?
If you’re reading this and think you could use a new partner to help manage your images on Salesforce, then SharinPix is right for you. We’d love to connect and discuss your specific visual use case and arrive at a solution that’s perfect for your needs.
To start, you can learn more by checking out our AppExchange listing:
On the AppExchange, you can learn about the basics of SharinPix and try them yourself in a Test Drive or spin a trial org. Most importantly, our Visual Experts are always available in the AppExchange chat if you have any questions.
