Different Types of Salesforce.com Sandbox
* Sandbox EnvironmentProduction is an environment where the actual users work with the actual data and is maintained by Administrators.
Sandbox is an environment shared by Salesforce.com for the testing and the development purpose and is mostly used by Developers and Testers.Migration from sandbox to production environment can happen via Eclipse tool or SFDC Change sets. Eclipse tool is a much more recommended approach.
There are three kind of Sandboxes in SFDC and the difference lies in the limit of Data StorageDeveloper Sandbox:
This is the most basic sandbox provided by SFDC. This comes as free and can even be created by anyone who wants to have Look and Feel of SFDC. It can store 10 MB of data and can be refreshed everyday ( Feature of Winter’11 Release ).This sandbox can not be created from production environment.Config only Sandbox: This is a paid sandbox and cost around 10% of production environment. This is mostly used when system needs to be tested with good chunk of data. This sandbox can be created directly from the production environment and can be refreshed everyday. This Sandbox has the 500MB Data Limit.
It’s always advisable to negotiate for these Sandbox at the time of buying salesforce.com licenses as one gets different no. and types of sandboxes depending on the edition of salesforce selected.