Next Level Shopify: Avoiding Crises with Shopify Backups

Next Level Shopify: Avoiding Crises with Shopify Backups
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There is a lot of room for error on Shopify. If you’ve been using the platform for long enough, you know how easy it is to make an irreversible mistake. And, if you’ve been in that situation before, you probably know how little responsibility the Shopify team carries when it comes to mistakes you’ve made.

These mistakes can range from deleting a single product (yup, there’s no undo button for that one) to deleting an entire shop theme. How does this happen? Let’s consider some of these use cases:

  • It’s 2:00am and you press “delete” instead of “duplicate”... poof… your product is gone.
  • You’re bulk editing your products and upload a CSV, checking “replace products with the same title”... but your CSV was messed up and wipes all of your product data.
  • You hire an amatuer developer at a steal-of-a-rate to fix a tiny spacing issue on your About page and (s)he erases your entire JSON (read: content) file.
  • You hire a somewhat fiery marketing rep and come to disagree over some labor charges. (S)he, in tern, decides to delete everything in your shop in vengeance.
  • You download a semi-sketchy app, giving it full permissions, and… well… you get the rest.

For those of you who have been in a similar situation (usually accompanied by tears, wine, and a middle-of-the-night Shopify support chat session), you know the pain. There just aren’t many worse feelings than significantly messing up your shop.

It doesn’t help that Shopify bears no responsibility for your loss. Not only that, but they have very few, if any, methods to help you in those situations. Generally, the company that is Shopify (or any ecommerce platform, for that matter) is only responsible for the general stability of the platform. In other words, Shopify, as an organization, is only concerned with the things that affect many Shopify users - like the day-to-day stability of the Shopify platform, the payments functionality, and the general security of the data as a whole. You, the merchant, are responsible for anything that has to do with your shop specifically, like your products, themes, and customer lists.

This chart outlines these responsibilities:


What this boils down to:

  • You and your ecommerce service provider (Shopify) share the responsibility of keeping your data secure and available.
  • Shopify is responsible for the software, infrastructure, and disaster recovery of the entire platform. Merchants are responsible for password security, the permissions given to users and third-party apps, and backups of the data they put into their stores.
  • Shopify has a macro-backup of their entire system but they will not use it to recover a single account to a previous point in time.

It’s not surprising that Shopify doesn’t offer much functionality in the way of backing up your site. Simply put, it’s not their problem. And when something isn’t a problem, you don’t usually put time, money, and effort into creating a solution.

So, how do you prevent one of these data loss crises?


You do what every Shopify shop owner does for any problem they confront: you download a third-party app. (You could, of course, manually export of all your customers, products, orders, themes, and reviews every single day and store them in spreadsheets all over your cloud… but that would be a royal pain in the ass).

There are more than a few apps that’ll automatically back all of your Shopify data up. The most popular, by far, is the Rewind App, which automatically backs up every detail of your shop into the cloud every time an edit is made. If anything ever happens, you (the owner) can easily reinstate your shop, whether it be the last instance or an older backup. They’re trusted by some of the largest brands on Shopify, like Gymshark, MVMT, and Paul Mitchell.

Most of our clients subscribe to Rewind. And rightfully so. When you run a 6- or 7-figure business, the last thing you want keeping you up at night is your entire livelihood disappearing because of a technical glitch or human error.

Let’s build something.