Why an app can only see your last 60 days of orders

The short version

An app that asks Shopify for permission to read orders gets the last 60 days of them. Everything older is not hidden behind a paywall and not slow to load: it is simply not in the answer the app receives.

Reading the full order history needs a second, separate permission. Shopify grants it to the app after a review, and it is not something the merchant can switch on from the admin.

Why this matters more for backups than for anything else

For most apps the window is an inconvenience. For a backup it decides what the backup contains. An app without the extra permission can only ever store the trailing 60 days, so the archive begins on the day it was installed and can never reach further back than two months.

There is a second, quieter problem. Orders leave the visible window on a rolling basis - a slice of them every week. A sync that reconciles its copy against what the API returns will see those orders disappear and can conclude they were deleted. Nothing was deleted. The order is in the store, in the admin, in every report, and only the app has stopped being shown it.

If that conclusion is written into the backup, the record is marked gone. A later cleanup pass removes what looks like dead weight, and the last real copy of a live order goes with it. The damage is invisible until someone needs that order back.

How to check what your app can see

In the Shopify admin open Settings, then Apps and sales channels, pick the app and look at the permissions it was given. An app that can read the full history says so there. Do this before you rely on any app for order history, ours included - it takes ten seconds and it is the only answer that is actually about your store.

Where StoreVault stands

StoreVault holds the permission for full order history, granted on 28 July 2026, so orders are captured beyond the 60-day window.

Two things we do not dress up. First, orders and customers are a verified archive with diff and export, not a one-click restore - Shopify creates a new order rather than resurrecting the old one, so calling it a restore would be a lie. The full boundary is on what backup apps can and cannot restore. Second, a store that installed under an older grant can have a narrower window than the app itself; we never mark a type whose visibility is limited as deleted, precisely so that the failure above cannot happen here.

What to do with this

If order history matters to you - for accounting, for disputes, for returns beyond two months - check the permission before you choose, and keep your own export as well. A backup app is not a reason to stop having a copy you control: exports and backups solve different problems.