StoreVault and Judge.me: what a restore does to your reviews
Last updated 7 September 2026
StoreVault is a versioned backup app for Shopify; Judge.me keeps your reviews in its own database and writes three metafields onto each product so your theme can show a rating. We installed Judge.me on its free plan on a store we own, imported reviews with their own wizard, then overwrote their rating metafield and deleted a product that had reviews - and restored both with StoreVault. The short version: the rating on your storefront comes back; your reviews were never ours to lose; and a deleted product that comes back under a new ID keeps its Judge.me reviews.
What we ran, and what actually happened
Tested on 7 September 2026 against a development store, with Judge.me on the Free plan. Development stores are offered their paid plan for free; we took the free one on purpose, so this page describes what a merchant on the free plan actually gets. Reviews were loaded through Judge.me’s own Import from a spreadsheet wizard, matched by product handle - their import log recorded 6 of 6 imported, 0 failed. Their metafields caught up with the new numbers about three and a half minutes later.
| What we did to the store | StoreVault | What the store and Judge.me said afterwards |
|---|---|---|
| Their rating metafield is overwritten by something else | Restored | The judgeme.review_widget_data and judgeme.badge metafields came back word for word - 3 reviews, average 4.67. Judge.me's own database said the same thing that minute, so the storefront and their records agreed again. |
| A product with reviews is deleted, then restored | Restored, with a boundary | The product comes back under a new product ID - the old one died with the record. The reviews followed it: Judge.me answered for the new ID within 22 seconds, and the old ID returns 404 on their API. We ran this twice. |
| Restoring to a moment before a review arrived | Does what you asked | The badge went back to the count it had at that moment (1 review) while Judge.me still held 2. Judge.me did not correct it on its own: twenty-five minutes later, and a minute after we edited the product, the older number was still there. |
| Undoing the restore | Covers what was overwritten | Undo put their metafield back to the state the restore had replaced. The recreated product is not removed by an undo, and never will be: that would mean deleting from your store. |
| Your review content itself | Not ours to back up | Reviews, replies, photos and widget settings live in Judge.me's database, not in your store. A store backup cannot see them and cannot bring them back. Judge.me exports them. |
The case nobody publishes: a deleted product that had reviews
This is the incident merchants actually hit, and the one every backup vendor leaves vague. On Shopify a deleted product cannot come back under its old ID; a restore recreates it as a new record with a new ID. Reviews are attached to a product ID. So: does the merchant get a product with an empty review widget?
No. We deleted a product with two reviews and restored it. It came back under a new ID, and Judge.me’s own database followed the product: their public endpoint answered with both reviews for the new ID 22 seconds after the record was recreated, while the old ID returned 404. We ran the whole thing a second time to be sure the first result was not luck. Nothing had to be fixed in their interface - and if a review ever does not follow, Judge.me can move a review from one product to another.
There is a second half to this, and it is ours. A restore also puts Judge.me’s three metafields back onto the recreated product, so the rating on the page is right immediately rather than after their next sync. That matters because of how their widget works: their own installation code keys the widget to product.id and seeds it from product.metafields.judgeme.review_widget_data before their script has said anything. The first thing a shopper sees is exactly the metafield a restore returns.
Restoring to a moment before a review arrived
A restore returns the store to the moment you picked - including the rating. If reviews arrived after that moment, the badge goes back to the older number while Judge.me still holds every review. In our run the badge went back to 1 review while their database held 2, and it stayed there: twenty-five minutes later it had not corrected itself, and it was still the older number a minute after we edited the product. We did see their app refresh all three metafields once - two seconds after we published a product to the online store - so it does catch up, but not on a timetable you should plan a restore around.
So the rule to hold on to: your reviews are never lost by a restore, but the rating shown on the page follows the moment you restored to until Judge.me writes it again. If you are restoring one broken product rather than rolling the catalogue back in time, this does not arise - pick the moment just before the damage.
The boundaries, stated plainly
- We do not back up your reviews. Reviews, replies, photos, widget settings, coupons and campaigns are Judge.me’s data, held in Judge.me’s infrastructure. A store backup has no access to them and should not. Judge.me has its own export.
- An undo covers what a restore overwrote, not what it recreated. Removing a recreated product would mean deleting from your store, which a backup app should never do on its own.
- We exercised the free plan. Judge.me’s paid features - their reviews API, automated request flows, Google sync - were not part of the run, and we do not claim what we have not run.
- We did not install their review widget into this store’s theme, so there is no screenshot of a themed product page here. What we checked instead is the endpoint that widget calls and the metafields it reads - both keyed to the product ID.
- Media files are not re-attached by a restore, and manual collection membership is not written back - the same boundaries as everywhere else, listed in full on what backup apps can and cannot restore.
How this was verified
The run is a command in our repository, not a one-off demo: it reads the truth from both sides before and after every step - the product metafields from Shopify, the review counts from Judge.me’s public widget endpoint - and every number above is its literal output. We re-run it when the restore code changes, and the date above moves only with a real re-run. The same method is published in full on the restore drill report, and the other two integration pilots are on the Simple Bundles page and the Power Tools Bulk Edit Tags page.
A backup app covers you from the day it is installed, not from the day you need it. That is true of all of them, ours included.
StoreVault on the Shopify App Store - versioned backups of products, collections, content and themes, plus inventory levels on paid plans, with a plan shown before any restore writes.