How to Populate a Developer Sandbox with Real Data in 5 Minutes

Anyone that has ever tried to populate a Salesforce database with a lot of tables using Dataloader knows the level of pain and patience required. I am not suffering that pain anymore when I need to build a test environment.

Take a guess: How long does it take to populate a developer sandbox with a subset of your production Salesforce data when you want:

• The top 500 revenue Opportunities in the past year.
• All related Account, Contact, Line Items, Quotes, Quote Line Items, and a few other records.

Would you believe 3 minutes and 38 seconds? Here's the screen shot of the stuff I just restored to a blank developer sandbox.

My formerly empty sandbox now has 518 Opportunities, 451 Accounts, 5072 Contacts, and lots of other stuff. I hardly had time to get a coffee. Perhaps the coolest thing is that all the difficult stuff of making sure the the records reference each other property with their newly assigned Salesforce Ids happened.