Why did an Automated Process User refresh my partial Sandbox in Salesforce? I was unsure who this person or process was, and what it was trying to accomplish. It refreshed a Partial Sandbox that had some updates made, prior to testing and uploading as a change set. What is the Automated Process user, and what invoked the process?
When selecting this user, even as a System Admin, the screen will return with an insufficient privileges error:
Wait, what? This is interesting. Time to figure out if anyone else is experiencing this issue as well?
Upon further investigation, it appears that this is a known Salesforce issue, that appears to only be affecting Partial Sandboxes:
If this issue affects you as well, please be sure to visit this link, click login at the top right, and check the box that “this issue affects me”! Since there are no workarounds, I’m certain that Salesforce is on it to solve the issue. Here is the link to visit the Salesforce Community’s Known Issues detail link regarding the above issue that was affecting my Org.
To be clear, an Automated Process User is the bug. Thankfully, another Admin actually requested the refresh of the Partial Sandbox, so no harm was done to the data and affect any of the changes that were involved!