How to Back Up Your Shopify Store (Complete Guide)

Have you ever installed an app only for everything to crash? Or accidentally deleted products that took hours to set up? Many Shopify owners have been there, and the lesson is always the same: back up your store regularly. Here’s everything you need to know about backing up your Shopify store.

Why You Need to Back Up Your Shopify Store

Here’s something most people don’t realise—Shopify doesn’t have built-in backups that you can access. While Shopify backs up data for their internal use, you won’t have access to it if something goes wrong. If you accidentally delete products, mess up your theme, or a rogue app corrupts your data, it’s gone for good.

Common scenarios where backups save the day:

• App conflicts: Installing a new app that breaks your theme or corrupts data
• Theme updates gone wrong: Updating your theme and losing customisations
• Accidental deletions: Removing products, collections, or pages by mistake
• Bulk edit errors: A CSV import that overwrites the wrong data
• Staff mistakes: Team members making unintended changes

What Can (and Can’t) Be Backed Up

Before diving into methods, understand what Shopify allows you to export and what requires third-party tools:

Exportable via Shopify Admin (CSV)

• Products (including variants and images URLs)
• Customers
• Orders
• Discount codes
• Gift card codes
• Financial reports

Requires Manual Download or Apps

• Theme files
• Blog posts and pages
• Collections
• Navigation menus
• Metafields and custom data
• Store settings
• Redirects

Method 1: Manual Exports (Free)

The simplest approach is exporting CSV files directly from Shopify. While this requires manual effort, it’s free and gives you control over your data.

Back Up Your Theme

Your theme contains all your design customisations and is often the hardest thing to recreate. Here’s how to download it:

1. Go to Online Store → Themes
2. Click the three dots (…) next to your current theme
3. Select Download theme file
4. Shopify will email you a .zip file

Pro tip: If you’re familiar with GitHub, you can use GitHub integration to keep your theme files version-controlled. This makes it easy to restore previous versions and track code changes. Any developer worth their salt should be using this—if you’re not technical, consider hiring a professional to set this up.

Back Up Products

1. Go to Products → All products
2. Click Export
3. Choose All products or a filtered selection
4. Select CSV for Excel, Numbers, or other spreadsheet programs
5. Click Export products

Back Up Customers

1. Go to Customers
2. Click Export
3. Choose All customers
4. Click Export customers

Back Up Orders

1. Go to Orders
2. Click Export
3. Choose your date range or All orders
4. Click Export orders

Back Up Discount Codes

1. Go to Discounts
2. Click Export
3. Choose All discount codes
4. Click Export discounts

Method 2: Create a Duplicate Store

For a more complete backup, you can create a duplicate store. This is particularly useful if you want to test major changes before applying them to your live store.

1. Create a new Shopify store (use a development store if you’re a Shopify Partner)
2. Export all CSV files from your original store using the steps above
3. Download your theme and upload it to the new store
4. Import your CSV files into the new store
5. Reinstall essential apps and reconfigure settings

Limitations: This method won’t copy over blogs, pages, navigation menus, or metafields. You’ll need to recreate these manually or use a backup app.

Method 3: Use Backup Apps

For comprehensive, automated backups, third-party apps are the most reliable solution. Here are the top options:

Rewind Backups

Rewind is the most popular Shopify backup solution. It automatically backs up your entire store daily and lets you restore individual items or your entire store with one click.

• What it backs up: Products, collections, customers, orders, blogs, pages, menus, metafields, theme files, and more
• Pricing: From $9/month (7-day free trial)
• Best for: Stores that need comprehensive, automated protection

Matrixify (formerly Excelify)

Matrixify is more of a data management tool but excels at comprehensive exports. You can schedule automatic exports of all your store data.

• What it backs up: Everything exportable including metafields, collections, redirects, and blog posts
• Pricing: Free tier available (paid plans from $20/month)
• Best for: Stores that need granular control over data exports

Automatic Backups

This app automatically saves every change you make, creating a complete version history of your store.

• Pricing: From $8.95/month (14-day free trial)
• Best for: Stores that want point-in-time recovery options

How Often Should You Back Up?

The right backup frequency depends on how often you update your store:

• High-volume stores (daily product/inventory changes): Daily automated backups
• Medium-volume stores (weekly updates): Weekly backups minimum
• Low-volume stores (rarely changes): Monthly backups plus before any major changes

Always back up before:

• Installing new apps
• Updating or changing your theme
• Running bulk product imports
• Making significant store changes

Which Method Should You Use?

For most store owners, we recommend a combination approach:

1. Use a backup app (like Rewind or Matrixify) for automated, comprehensive protection
2. Download your theme manually before making any theme changes
3. Export critical CSVs monthly and store them in Google Drive or Dropbox as an extra layer of protection

The small monthly cost of a backup app is nothing compared to the time and money you’d lose recreating your store from scratch. Don’t wait until disaster strikes—set up your backup system today.