Keeping your Salesforce orgs in sync is a constant challenge—whether it’s personal sandboxes drifting from shared environments like staging or staging falling out of step with production. Before long, you’re dealing with deployment conflicts, unexpected errors, unreliable tests, and the classic “but it worked in my sandbox!” moments. When orgs drift, teams risk duplicating work, overwriting changes, and introducing bugs into production. Staying in sync keeps your releases smooth, your rework minimal, and your sanity intact.

Many teams rely on full org refreshes to realign environments. While this might seem like the simplest solution, it comes with significant downsides:

• Data loss – A full refresh wipes out existing data and metadata.
• Disruption to ongoing work – Teams often have to pause development during a refresh.
• Risk of overwriting valuable changes – It’s easy to lose track of which changes need to be restored, increasing the risk of overwriting critical updates.
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That’s where Salto comes in. Salto lets you compare your orgs and sync only what you need, when you need it. No data loss, no disruption to ongoing work, and no need to pause development across the team. Plus, Salto helps you automate the process to prevent future drifts. You can do a quick one-time sync, complement the refresh when needed, and establish the ongoing processes your team needs to keep orgs from drifting in the first place.

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‍1. One-Time Sync

‍If you’re just getting started and your orgs are already out of sync—whether it’s personal sandboxes, staging, or production—Salto has you covered. You can run a one-time sync by following the steps below:

‍Compare environments – Easily detect the differences between your orgs with Salto’s built-in filters and intuitive navigation. Quickly identify which elements need to be aligned without digging through endless metadata.

Deploy or back-promote missing elements – Once you know what’s out of sync, Salto makes it simple to bring those elements into the target org. Large metadata types are broken down into smaller components, so you can sync only the specific bits that drifted instead of copying the entire element. This works both up and down the pipeline, depending on where the changes need to go.

2. Keeping your orgs from drifting 

‍Once your orgs are aligned, the real challenge is keeping them that way. Salto gives you the tools to establish a comprehensive release process that prevents orgs from drifting apart over time. By integrating Salto into your workflow, you can ensure that every change is tracked, promoted/back-promoted, and managed efficiently across all environments. Here’s how:

‍Pipelines – Use Salto’s Pipelines to track work and ensure that every change moves through all the environments in your release process. This provides clear visibility into where each work item is, reducing the risk of changes not making it to all environments—and preventing your orgs from going out of sync.

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Promotions and Back-Promotions – Salto lets you bundle multiple deployments and promote them through your environments. This works both ways - up the pipeline to production or back-promoting them to lower environments.

Reverts – Sometimes features don’t make it to the finish line, and that’s okay. Salto allows you to easily revert work items that your team decides not to move forward with. This helps prevent incomplete or unused changes from getting stuck in the pipeline and keeps your orgs clean and consistent.By building these practices into your release process, Salto helps you maintain alignment across your orgs and reduces the manual effort needed to keep everything in sync.‍

3. How Salto Complements the Refresh Process

‍If your team decides to do a refresh, Salto can help make the process smoother and less risky. Refreshing an org can often feel like starting from scratch, but with Salto, you don’t have to worry about losing important customizations or work-in-progress. Salto gives you the ability to restore any metadata elements you might want to add back after the refresh has taken place.

‍Restore previous Salto deployments – Salto keeps a history of all deployments made to your org. After a refresh, you can easily access this history and redeploy any configurations that need to be restored.

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With Salto, refreshing doesn’t have to mean starting from zero. You get the flexibility to refresh when needed, while still keeping your customizations and configurations intact. Start your 30-day trial and see for yourself >>

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