Play in the Sandbox!

The Salesforce Sandbox is essentially an exact copy of your Salesforce.com instance, used for testing without affecting your real database. As a matter of policy, we encourage our customers to purchase the Salesforce Sandbox so we may properly conduct configuration-testing, integration-testing, and even training. Since Winter ‘06 edition, Salesforce has made it simple to take a "snapshop" of production, and clone it onto the sandbox at the click of a button.

Pros

• Production can be cloned to Sandbox with the click of a button.
• Complete or partial production database copy is available to clone.
• Sandboxes exist on completely separate servers, which prevents any impact of production.
• End-users can log in by appending “.test” to their Salesforce user logins. For example, if your login in your production account is user@company.domain, then your login for this
  sandbox is user@company.domain.test.
• Production data can be scrambled upon cloning, so Sandbox developers are not handling sensitive data.

Cons

• Only included with unlimited edition, or available as an add-on with Enterprise.
• Sandbox can only be refreshed once every 30 days, although we’ve found a phone call to Salesforce helps remedy this limit on an as needed basis.
• No tools built into Admin available to migrate back from Sandbox to Production. See "Reverse Sandbox" on the Idea Exchange.

Tools to Migrate to Production

While there are not built in tools to migrate from sandbox back to production, there are 3 common tools used for this process:

• Force.com IDE
• Apex Deployment Tool
• Snapshot from Dreamfactory

Test Salesforce Mobile on Sandbox

You can also deploy Salesforce Mobile in your sandbox environment. The details on this process are located here:

• Download Salesforce Mobile Sandbox How-To

Force.com Sandbox

• Nucleus white paper—Force.com Sandbox: A New Reason to Go On-Demand
• Force.com Development & Test Environment