[SalesForce] how to import data from production environment to Developer Pro Sandbox

I have a production environment of Salesforce.com with huge data (more than 15,000 records) .. I bought Developer Pro Sandbox and created it.
Now, I want to move my data to this Sandbox as it to do some tests on it.
I exported All records of each object from production salesforce using Data Loader application. But when I import these files to Sandbox the IDs changed and the relations (lookups fields) got errors.

How can I solve this problem?

Best Answer

The Ids will change because you are creating new records in the developer sandbox. I have found the easiest thing to do is to:

  1. Create a productionId ExternalId field in each of the parent objects.
  2. Import new parents and match original Id to productionId field
  3. Upset children records and relate them to parent with original parentId matched to productionId field.
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