Does Salesforce Sandbox Seeding tools to propagate (targeted) data to lower environments with some clicks is really helpful

On trailhead Salesforce today saw a Salesforce Sandbox Seeding tool to propagate (targeted) data to lower environments with some clicks, my question is it really helpful? , i saw Salesforce was pushing in this direction for migrating data from current company org to the new org.. but won't it make companies to enter into a licensed product agreement if it’s a one time thing.

Also Would this empower devs or help with automated testing in lower environments?Your honest responses are highly appreciated

Here is the link of product https://www.ownbackup.com/products-sandbox-seeding/

Regards, Carolyn

Out of the box you get something to copy over data to full copy and partial copy sandboxes. It'd be exact copy, you'd then have to run a script to anonymise the data, break email addresses on contacts, leads etc (yes, there's way to run Apex class as part of refresh, it's called "PostCopy").

The good bits

There's https://www.salesforce.com/products/platform/features/data-mask/, list price is 10% of your SF net spend (link). Bit expensive but all on the platform? And supposed to work also in dev / dev pro?

There are OwnBackup, Odaseva, Gearset etc offerings (I'm not affiliated with either) but it's bit of a package deal. The focus is on deployment automation, backup & restore and sandbox seeding is kind of side effect. Are you ready to abandon changesets? Do you have production backup & restore strategy in place? Tested?

The bad bits

If you go with anything other than Data Mask - expect you'll have to put some effort in. There's no silver bullet. If you have validation rule "you can't create Opportunities with Close Date in the past" - you're screwed. They will not load OK. Whether it's a seeding scenario or restore from backup. You'd need to identify these and put some bypasses in them (like "don't run if I have Custom Permission called "backup" and you'd then assign / unassign a permission set with it. Because it's bad idea to "don't run if I'm sysadmin", in the long run these backfire). Similarly you might have to:

• skip certain apex triggers.
• make a mini deployment to disable duplicate rules (how good will your email anonymisation be, eh?)
• disable field history tracking during cleanup (congratulations on masking this contact's email with some rubbish, shame the old and new value is still visible in field history)
• or activate "set audit fields" if you need to write original CreatedDate fields.

So... if we accept the fact there's some level of work needed... sfdx tool can assign permission sets. Can run deployments. Can create sandboxes, load data from CSV or even JSON files (great for parent-child like Account+Contacts). There's even this sfdx plugin which takes a while to master but it's absolutely awesome: http://help.sfdmu.com/ It all can run from commandline so you click a script and your new environment is ready 5 min later.

So where would you draw a line? How much you're willing to pay for OwnBackup vs doing it yourself. Yes, it's work but you'll have to do a bit of it either way. By all means chat with sales reps, evaluate products... but it'll have to suit your needs and at the end of the day only you know which trigger / integration / email alert has to be turned off or else it'll spam finance system with test data...