I'm working on migrating metadata and data from one org to a clean brand new org. The purpose for this migration is because we are moving from unlimited to enterprise edition and making this change requires a completely brand new org.
For the source org, I've created a project in Visual Studio Code and pulled down as much metadata that was available to retrieve using Package XML Generator extension. It took quite awhile to run, but it finally did retrieve the metadata successfully. The only error that occurred was with ObjectTranslations and I removed that folder from the project structure and commented out the node in the package.xml.Then the metadata retrieval was successful.
Now, pointing to the target org and deploying the metadata is a whole other beast. A couple of questions around this process. First, is there a way to run test deployment validations to see if there are any errors? I'm expecting that there will be some issues moving to a brand new org. Second, when I retrieved the metadata from the source org using the package xml generator extension, it pulled down the metadata from installed packages (managed and unmanaged). All the packages will be installed into the target org before attempting to deploy the metadata. Will deploying managed package metadata cause issues? Are there other issues to be aware of when attempting to deploy the metadata to a new org? Is there another tool like Workbench that would be better to handle deploying the metadata. Purchasing a 3rd party app is not an option so I can't go that route.
Thanks.
Best Answer
Yes. Use the "check only" deployment option. This is available in Workbench, Salesforce DX, and other migration tools.
Yes. You will need to remove these extra files before attempting to deploy.
You might have to work with your profile metadata to get some of the metadata to align, but those will come up in the check only deployment.
All of the options are pretty much the same. After all, the underlying API is always the same. Choose whichever you prefer. VS Code, Ant, Salesforce DX, Workbench, and so on. There are a ton of free options available.