I inherited an org that was maxed out on data storage, so I cleaned up the fields per object. The largest issue was Leads, where I was able to remove 100 of the custom fields. However, this did not have an affect on the Data Storage used by the Leads table (1.4GB before and 1.4GB after)... I was sure to actually erase the fields, not just delete them...

What am I missing?

Attribution to: Nathan Williams

Possible Suggestion/Solution #1

Storage calculations in Salesforce are not quite as you might expect. Each Lead counts as 2KB regardless of how many custom fields there are or whether they contain any data.

http://help.salesforce.com/HTViewHelpDoc?id=admin_monitorresources.htm&language=en_US

As evidences in 'Personal Edition' (10,000 records = 20MB) this may come as a surprise! Even an object with 1MB of data in a bunch of text areas counts as just 2KB towards your storage limits. Some objects are 'heavier' than others (eg Campaign at 8KB) but to reclaim space you need to clean records vertically as opposed to horizontally.

Attribution to: bigassforce
This content is remixed from stackoverflow or stackexchange. Please visit https://salesforce.stackexchange.com/questions/31977