• Customizations and data changes in your production organization do not automatically appear in your sandboxes. You must create a new sandbox or refresh an existing one to see the customizations made to your organization since the last time you created or refreshed a sandbox
  • Sandbox copy is a long-running operation that occurs in the background. You are notified of the completion of a sandbox copy via email. Sandbox refreshes may complete in minutes, days, or even more than a week
  • Always log in to your sandbox organization using the https://test.salesforce.com login URL
  • Sandbox IDs can change with each refresh
  • Salesforce stores sandbox organizations on several instances. When a sandbox is created or refreshed, an instance is selected for your sandbox, so your sandbox may appear on different instances and have different URLs
  • When data that contains object IDs is copied from your production instance into your sandbox, the object IDs in your sandbox match the object IDs in your production instance
  • Sandboxes must be on the same version as Production in order to take advantage of the AppExchange
  • Freeze all changes to your production organization while a sandbox is being created or refreshed. Setup and data changes to your production organization during the sandbox creation and refresh operations may result in inconsistencies in your sandbox.
  • Refreshing a sandbox deletes and recreates the sandbox as a new copy of the production organization. In effect, this reverses any manual access changes you have performed. If you created users on sandbox, they will no longer exist; if you changed a user’s profile and permissions, those will revert to their values in the production organization. This means that after a refresh, any access changes you performed must be repeated in the new copy. To avoid this process, you can create user templates in your production organization, and then activate them in the sandbox organization.
  • Features Disabled in Sandbox (Note:  These features can not be enabled in the sandbox)
    • Case escalation, opportunity reminders, and contract expiration warnings are disabled because they automatically send email to contacts, customers and users who should not interact with sandboxes.
    • Subscription summary
    • Automated weekly data exports
    • The ability to create Salesforce sandboxes.
    • Testing Salesforce Content in your sandbox is not supported.
    • Testing Salesforce for Google AdWords in your sandbox is not supported. Attempting to test Salesforce for Google AdWords in your sandbox will result in errors because your sandbox organization operates with the same link to your Google AdWords account as your production organization.
    • Email service addresses that you create in your sandbox cannot be copied to your production organization.
  • Info and URLs
    • Links
      • Avoid using absolute URLs in custom links https://na1.salesforce.com/00Oz0000000EVpU&pv0={!Account_ID}
      • Instead use relative URLs /00Oz0000000EVpU&pv0={!Account_ID}
      • only use relative URLs in your production organization
    • Integrations
      • Do not hard code integrations toward a specific instance. (Web Service API calls)
    • Sandbox and production instances upgrade at different times
      • A Sandbox may be upgraded earlier or later than the production org, depending on instance
      • Sandbox instance is determined by date of the copy
      • Look at trust.salesforce.com for information on sandbox upgrade timing