How to back up a Shopify store

What you can do without any app

Three things, and it is worth knowing exactly how far they go.

CSV exports. The admin exports products, customers and orders as flat tables. Useful, and free. What they do not carry is the rest of the store: themes, the structure of collections, pages, blog articles, menus, URL redirects, and the settings that make a storefront look like itself.

Theme downloads. Any theme can be downloaded as a zip from Online Store, Themes. Do it before every large edit, because the previous version of a theme you edited in place is not kept forever.

Duplicating. Duplicating a theme before you touch it costs nothing and has saved more storefronts than any tool.

Where the manual approach runs out

Nothing in the admin returns your store to how it was on Tuesday. A deleted product does not come back from the trash, an app that rewrote 4,000 descriptions leaves no undo, and a CSV exported last month tells you what changed only if you diff it yourself.

The gap is not really "a copy of the data". It is a copy with time in it: the ability to say put this record back to how it was before that import, and to see what that would change before it happens.

What a backup app should give you

Version history per record, not one nightly snapshot that overwrites the last. A restore that shows a plan first, record by record, and can be undone. Evidence that the stored copies actually open - a backup nobody has ever read back is a promise. And a plain answer about what cannot be restored, because that part is the same for every app on this platform.

The honest limits, ours included, are on what backup apps can and cannot restore.

A workable routine

Duplicate the theme before editing it. Export products to CSV before a bulk edit, because it costs a minute. Install a backup app that keeps versions and proves them - StoreVault has a free plan, and its first drill receipt arrives within the day so you can judge it on evidence. Then stop thinking about backups until the day you need one, which is the entire point.