Posted on Reddit as well; Duplicates - Merge OR Inactivate? I’ve got 10 years worth of customer data, including transactions, website forms, and imported marketing lists. The database hasn’t been well-managed, and now I’m dealing with tons of duplicate records, many with no transaction history. Should I go through the effort of merging all the duplicates, or would it be better to just set them inactive and move on? What’s the best way to clean this up? Any advice is always appreciated

Totally up to you/the business. Depends on the potential value of that data versus the work to clean it up. Also don't forget to factor in that one annoying sales guy who'll make your life miserable b/c one contact from 10 years is missing and that's why he can't make his quota 😂. But in all seriousness, if it was me I'd probably do a solid merge/cleanup on everything that's had any activity in the last 2 years, and then just inactivate the rest unless/until someone screamed. IME the value of data after 2 years is approaching zero. But again, you know your data and your business better than me or anyone else on here, so trust your own analysis, and go with that.

Thanks for the input @James Morris. The reasoning behind this is utilize the recently stood up snowflake data warehouse flows that'll go into PowerBI dashboards for the business intelligence dept of the company. We've been recently acquired by a private investment firm and the lack of data integrity is starting to skew the dashboards oddly. We've also recently deployed SFC for the CRM aspect of it and purchased mulesoft to handle the data sync, which is having problems as well....I think the effort i'll take is as you suggested, spend the time and plan out a clean up effort for records with no activity in the past ~2 years....