Hi everyone,
I want to warn you about a problem I discovered that might help others avoid the same mistake.
We enabled activity synchronization between HubSpot and Salesforce, which included email marketing activities such as deliveries, opens, and clicks. Initially everything seemed to work properly, but problems appeared as our database grew.
Our database now contains more than 100K records. This integration created almost 3 million activity records in Salesforce over time (mainly from email marketing). During a regular system review, I found that these activities were consuming 87% of our Salesforce data storage capacity.
The situation was complicated by several factors:
• More than 2.5M activities were in archived status and hidden from regular views
• I needed to use Data Loader exports to understand the full scope
• About 90% of these activities were email marketing events that our team never references in Salesforce
I’m currently working through the cleanup process and removing archived activities from Salesforce is quite challenging.
The real problem: Salesforce additional storage costs are extremely high. Without this review, we would have purchased unnecessary storage capacity.
My advice: Turn off this activity synchronization in your HubSpot Salesforce integration unless your team actually needs marketing email data in Salesforce. This will prevent storage problems and avoid cleanup work later.
Has anyone else experienced this issue? What’s your approach for managing activity synchronization between these platforms?
We hit something similar about six months back, though not as bad as yours. Our integration pushed 800K activity records and ate up 60% of storage before we noticed. The cleanup was brutal - took our admin team three weeks to sort through and delete all the junk records. What saved us was setting up custom filters before turning sync back on. Now we only sync activities that matter - high-value prospect engagement or stuff tied to active deals. Gets us useful data without the storage nightmare. Also started doing quarterly storage audits so this doesn’t happen again.
Ugh, this is exactly why we turned off most sync features from day one. I’ve seen way too many horror stories like yours. Salesforce storage pricing is absolutely insane - they know you’re trapped once you’re in deep. We only sync contacts and deals now. Everything else stays in HubSpot where it should be.
Same thing happened to us 8 months ago, but we caught it at 1.2M synced activities. The real killer? Archived activities still eat up storage but don’t show in regular reports. We had to completely redo our integration after that mess. Here’s what saved us - we switched to selective sync based on lead scores. Only activities from high-scoring leads go to Salesforce now. Cut our sync volume by 85% and sales still gets the data they need. That cleanup you’re doing sucks, but try Salesforce’s bulk API instead of Data Loader for big deletions - way faster. Now we check storage limits every month religiously. The cost difference between platforms for marketing data is insane when you break it down per record.
thanks for sharing! we almost went ahead with full sync, but testing showed us what could happen. definetly gonna avoid syncing email activities now, salesforce storage fees are no joke! keeping that data in hubspot makes way more sense for us.
Had this exact same thing happen last year - almost bit us during renewal. Salesforce doesn’t warn you about integration storage until you’re nearly maxed out. We ended up with 2.1M marketing activity records that our sales team never even looked at. Deleting them was a nightmare since you can’t bulk delete activities through the normal interface. Had to write custom API scripts to clear it all out. Now we’re super strict about sync policies - only form submissions and actual sales activities get synced. Everything else stays in HubSpot where storage doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. We monitor storage religiously now. Expensive lesson learned.