Choosing A Masking Rule

While one is free to choose among the various masking rules that appear in the field’s drop-down, care should be taken when restoring data back into Salesforce using CopyStorm/Restore, as Salesforce has restrictions on the values that can be associated with a field value based upon that field’s data type.  For example, the Contact.Email field is of type “Email” and Salesforce will be unhappy if that field value is not formatted as a legitimate email address.  Legitimate in this sense does not mean it is a “legal” value (aka it is an actual email address that can send and receive emails), but, rather, it means that it “looks” like a real email address.  So, while you are free to use masking rules such as “Asterisks”, “Lorem Ipsum”, “Random”, etc. for purposes of restoring data the “To Null” masking rule is your best option.For data analysis purposes, in which one is running reports, there are no such limits (unless the reporting tool has similar restrictions as Salesforce) and choosing from some of the other masking rules becomes a meaningful operation.

The following table lists the provided masking rules for the different Salesforce data types.  The first entry for each data type is the default.  Any masking rule highlighted in blue is an acceptable value that can be used when the goal is to restore data back into Salesforce.