“We’re an SMB, not a storage expert. DataArchiva made the problem disappear.”
You got the notification. That little red flag inside Salesforce that says you’ve burned through 90% of your storage. Your team is already complaining that records take forever to load. Someone in sales is manually downloading CSVs because “it’s faster.” And now you’re staring at a Salesforce invoice that wants $125 a month for another 500MB.
The good news? Storage problems are fixable. And most of the fixes don’t require a developer, a consultant, or a second mortgage.
This blog explains how SMBs reach the full capacity of their Salesforce storage, the best ways to optimize Salesforce storage without spending too much on IT setups, and how DataArchiva brings enterprise archiving solutions to SMBs with enhanced security.
Your Salesforce is Slowing Down
The average SMB wastes around $4,800 a year on storage overages, redundant records, and the hours their team spends working around a sluggish CRM.
Enterprises can throw headcount at it. They have Salesforce architects, data governance teams, and dedicated admins whose whole job is keeping the org clean.
Most SMBs? You’ve got one person who “knows Salesforce best” and a full calendar of actual work to do.
Avoid the Moment Your Salesforce Says “Storage Full.”
So, where is all your storage going?
- Then come the duplicate records, the leads that never went anywhere.
- Then come the duplicate records, the leads that never went anywhere.
- There are even old email threads tied to closed cases, and the custom objects nobody uses anymore, but everyone's afraid to delete.
All of this adds up fast.
7 Ways to Manage Salesforce Data Growth For SMB
Salesforce data grows fast, especially when your SMB starts scaling, adding customers, and generating more records every day. Without a plan, things can get messy, slow, and expensive.
These 7 simple ways to manage Salesforce data growth in case of full storage help you stay in control and keep your org running smoothly.
1. Run the Storage Audit First
This sounds basic, but most people skip it. Salesforce has a built-in Storage Usage report under Setup. Run it. Look at what’s actually eating your storage before you start deleting things you might need.
Files are usually the biggest culprit. Then records. Then, custom objects. Once you know the breakdown, you can prioritize instead of just hacking away randomly.
2. Delete What You're Never Going to Use Again
Be honest with yourself. Those 14,000 leads from a 2019 trade show that never converted? Are the orphaned tasks attached to deleted contacts? The duplicate accounts that got created when someone fat-fingered an import? None of that is coming back.
Full Storage Can Break Workflows. Act Before it Does.
Salesforce has a Mass Delete tool built in for records. Use it. Just know that deletion is permanent, so do the audit in step one first. This is where most teams get burned: they delete records thinking they’re junk, then someone needs one of them six months later.
3. Stop Storing Files Inside Salesforce
Salesforce is a CRM, not a file storage system. But somehow it ends up holding contracts, pitch decks, product sheets, photos, and every PDF anyone has ever attached to a record.
- Link your Salesforce records to Google Drive, SharePoint, or Box instead.
- Files stay accessible from within the record, your team doesn't change their workflow, and
- Those attachments stop counting against your Salesforce storage limit.
This one change alone can free up more than half your storage in a lot of orgs.
4. Look Into Big Objects, But Know Their Limits
Salesforce offers Big Objects for storing massive volumes of data outside your regular storage limits. Great in theory. In practice, they require developer resources to set up and query; they’re not ideal for data you need to access regularly, and for most SMBs, they introduce more complexity than they solve.
Worth knowing about. Not the right first move for a team without a developer on staff.
5. Set Retention Policies Before the Crisis Hits
6. Compress and Optimize What You're Keeping
Not everything needs to be deleted. But that 80MB PowerPoint deck from 2021 attached to a won opportunity? It could be a 4MB PDF. Stripping metadata and converting old attachments to lighter formats before re-uploading sounds tedious, but for teams with a lot of historical file data, it adds up.
7. Salesforce Data Archiving for SMBs
This is the big one. The other six strategies are maintenance. Archiving is infrastructure.
Archiving means moving records and data you need to keep, but don’t need in active Salesforce storage, to secure, indexed, searchable cold storage. Archived records don’t count against your Salesforce limit. You can still pull them up, still search them, still stay compliant. They’re just not sitting inside Salesforce, burning through your storage allocation.
Customers who archive two or more years of historical data typically free up 60 to 70 percent of their Salesforce storage. At Salesforce’s pricing of $125 per 500MB per month, that math gets interesting fast.
Until recently, enterprise-grade archiving tools were priced for enterprises. We’re talking custom contracts starting in the tens of thousands of dollars per year. SMBs heard the pitch and walked away.
Introducing DataArchiva for SMBs
DataArchiva has been helping enterprise teams, including Fortune 500 companies, manage Salesforce data growth for years. The product works. The results are real. And we kept getting the same message from smaller teams: “We need exactly this. We just can’t afford the enterprise price tag.”
So we opened it up.
Starting today, DataArchiva is available to SMBs at a price point built for lean teams. Same product. Same archiving engine. Same compliance support, the same security standards, the same everything that enterprise customers have been using. Just priced for the reality of a growing business instead of a company with a dedicated Salesforce governance team.
Here's DataArchiva Archiving Works for SMBs
You connect DataArchiva to your Salesforce org.
It scans your records based on rules you set — age, record type, status, owner, whatever makes sense for your business.
It then moves those records to secure, compliant, indexed storage. Your team can still search and retrieve any archived record in seconds.
And, your Salesforce storage number drops.
Most customers break even within their first billing cycle.
Will I Actually Lose Access to My Data?
No. This is the question we get every time, and it’s the right one to ask.
Archiving is not deleting. Every archived record is indexed, searchable, and retrievable. You’re not throwing data away. You’re moving it from expensive active storage to smart cold storage. Your team’s access doesn’t change. Your compliance posture doesn’t change. Your Salesforce storage bill does.
- DataArchiva is SOC 2 Type II certified.
- Data is encrypted at rest and in transit.
- Every archive and retrieval action gets logged. And it works within your existing Salesforce permission model, so your team sees exactly what they're supposed to see.
Stop Paying the Salesforce Storage Tax
You shouldn’t have to be running a 10,000-person company to get access to the tools that solve this problem. DataArchiva’s SMB plan is live right now.
Messy Data Can Quietly Hurt SMB Growth. Clean it up Now.
