Plauti Restore saves record change history, and can restore field updates, inserts, merges, and deletions. Field updates can be undone as long as the change data is still present in Plauti Restore. This is determined by the data retention settings in Restore Setup. 

However, restores for merges and deletions rely on Salesforce’s Recycle Bin. Because the Recycle Bin has time and storage limits of its own, merges and deletions are not recoverable anymore once Salesforce permanently removes a record. 

How the Salesforce Recycle Bin works

Deleted records are retained in the Salesforce Recycle Bin for 15 days by default, and can be restored by Plauti Restore during that time. It is possible to extend this period to 30 days, by enabling Salesforce’s ‘Extended Recycle Bin Retention’ feature (read more in Salesforce's 'Enable Extended Recycle Bin Retention Feature' article).

However, Salesforce does not guarantee the exact time when items will be permanently deleted, even within the set retention window.

The Recycle Bin capacity is tied to your Org’s data storage: the maximum number of records retained equals 25 × (storage in MB). For example, an Org with 2,000 MB (2 GB) of storage can hold up to 50,000 records in the Recycle Bin. If the Recycle Bin reaches capacity, Salesforce will permanently delete the oldest items to make room for newly deleted records. This can cause records to disappear sooner than the time-based retention window.

This applies to records that have been deleted, and also to the non-Master records after a merge. When records are merged, the losing records are placed in the Recycle Bin, and are therefore subject to the same time/storage limits as deleted records.

How this affects Plauti Restore

Inserts and updates

Plauti Restore’s change history for inserts and updates can be retained and reapplied independently of the Salesforce Recycle Bin. However, they are still bound to the Plauti Restore retention settings. Once the limit of one of these retention settings is reached, the oldest data is deleted and cannot be restored anymore.

Merges and deletions 

Restoring a merged or deleted record requires the record to be still present in the Salesforce Recycle Bin. If a record has been permanently removed from the Recycle Bin (due to time or capacity), Plauti Restore cannot undo the merge or deletion anymore.

Plauti Restore has two retention controls: maximum number of Restore Changes kept, and number of days of Restore Changes kept (age of change data). These settings control how long Plauti retains change history needed to restore records, but they do not override Salesforce’s Recycle Bin limits for actual deleted/merged record recovery. 

So in order to restore a merged or deleted record, both its change history in Plauti Restore, and the record itself in the Salesforce Recycle Bin are needed. If a record is not present in the Salesforce Recycle Bin anymore, or its change history has been deleted because the Plauti Restore retention limit was reached, a merge or deletion cannot be undone anymore.

Recommended Admin actions and best practices

• Enable extended retention if you need more time for potential recovery of merges or deletions.
  Turn on Salesforce’s ‘Extended Recycle Bin Retention’ (up to 30 days) if your Org policies permit it. 
• Monitor Salesforce Recycle Bin storage usage
• Monitor Plauti Restore Change History storage usage
• Regularly create data exports or backups (Salesforce Data Export, third-party backup) so you can still recover permanently deleted records that way if necessary.