Shopify backup: the complete guide

If you run a Shopify store, a backup is the difference between a five-minute fix and a lost weekend. This is the complete guide to Shopify backup: what Shopify does and does not protect, what to back up, how restore and cloning work, and how to choose an app. The detailed walkthroughs are linked through each section.

Shopify does not give you a rollback

Shopify keeps your store online and runs its own infrastructure backups for disaster recovery, but you cannot roll your store back to an earlier state from the admin. There is no undo for a bad bulk edit, a misbehaving app, a broken theme or a deleted collection. Keeping a recoverable copy of your own data is your responsibility.

What you should back up

A real backup goes well past products. The full picture is 17 data types: products, collections, customers, orders, draft orders, pages, blogs, files, themes, metafields, metaobjects, discounts, translations, navigation, markets, inventory and locations. Personal data (customers and orders) needs extra care under Shopify Protected Customer Data.

Backups, restore and cloning

The three core jobs of a backup tool:

• Back up automatically on a schedule and on demand, versioned so history is never overwritten.
• Restore to a point in time, with a dry-run and a conflict policy.
• Clone a store into another for staging, expansion or migration.

The step-by-step guides cover each: read how to back up a Shopify store and how to clone a Shopify store.

Choosing a Shopify backup app

Judge apps on coverage, restore quality, storage and data control, and pricing (watch for usage caps). For a worked example, see HappySnap vs Rewind.

Where HappySnap fits

HappySnap does backup, point-in-time restore and store-to-store cloning across all 17 data types, with no usage cap and bring-your-own storage. See HappySnap for plans, or start with the guides below.