What to back up in a Shopify store (all 17 data types)

Most backup tools grab products and call it done. Then a theme edit breaks, a metaobject vanishes, and you find out the backup never held the thing you needed. Here is the full surface area of a Shopify store, and why each piece belongs in a backup.

The catalog

Products, variants and collections are the obvious core. The trap is collection rules and the references between objects: a backup that saves products but loses which collection they belong to leaves you rebuilding by hand. Save the relationships, not just the rows.

Themes and storefront content

Themes, theme settings, pages, blogs, files, navigation and translations all shape what shoppers see. Shopify keeps recent theme changes for a while, but a deleted page or a wiped navigation menu has no undo in the admin. Content is data; back it up.

Custom data

Metafields and metaobjects power a lot of modern storefronts, from spec tables to landing-page blocks. They are also the first thing cheap exporters skip. If your theme reads metaobjects, a backup that ignores them is not a backup of your store.

Commerce settings

Discounts, markets, inventory and locations decide how the store actually sells. Lose a markets config or an inventory state and the storefront behaves wrongly even though products look fine.

Personal data, handled carefully

Customers, orders and draft orders are personal data. Under Shopify Protected Customer Data, access is gated and reviewed, so this belongs on higher plans with the right controls, not in a casual CSV. HappySnap keeps customer and order backup to Pro and up for exactly this reason.

The full 17

Put together, that is products, collections, customers, orders, draft orders, pages, blogs, files, themes, metafields, metaobjects, discounts, translations, navigation, markets, inventory and locations. HappySnap captures all of them; many tools stop at the first two. See the coverage on HappySnap, and for how often to capture it, read how often should you back up a Shopify store. The Shopify backup pillar ties it together.