How to Back Up Shopify Store Data, Themes, and Content
A Shopify backup is a copy of your store’s data, theme and content kept outside your live store, so you can recover from deleted products, bad imports or broken theme edits. Shopify doesn’t give merchants restorable backups, so you build your own with the admin’s CSV exports, a theme download, a backup app or a mix of all three.
The challenge is that no single export covers everything. Knowing what each method captures, and what it misses, lets you build a backup routine that protects the parts of your store you’d struggle to rebuild.
Does Shopify Back Up Your Store?
Shopify protects its own platform and infrastructure, but it doesn’t offer merchants a way to roll back their individual store data. If you delete a product, overwrite descriptions with a faulty import or break your theme, there’s no built-in restore button.
That makes backups the store owner’s responsibility. The good news is that Shopify’s admin, theme tools and app ecosystem give you everything you need to build a reliable routine.
How to Back Up a Shopify Store
A complete Shopify backup covers each kind of data with the method that suits it. The table shows what to back up and the usual way to do it:
| Data | How to back it up |
|---|---|
| Products and variants | Product CSV export from the admin, including product metafields with definitions |
| Customers | Customer CSV export |
| Orders | Order CSV export, though orders can’t be re-imported through the admin |
| Inventory | Inventory CSV export |
| Discounts and gift cards | Export from their admin sections where available |
| URL redirects | Redirect CSV export |
| Theme | Download the theme file and keep dated duplicates |
| Pages, blog posts and menus | A backup app, an import and export app or manual copies |
| Product images and files | Image URLs in product exports, plus copies of original files kept outside Shopify |
| Settings and app data | Screenshots or notes for settings, and each app’s own export tools |
For most stores, the simplest complete approach is a backup app for everyday protection plus your own periodic exports as a second copy. Smaller stores can start with manual exports and add an app as they grow.
How to Make a Manual Shopify Backup
Manual backups cost nothing and give you files you control. They take time and only capture data at the moment you export, so they work best on a regular schedule.
Export your store data
- Export products. Go to Products, select Export, choose all products and download the CSV.
- Export customers. Go to Customers, select Export and choose all customers.
- Export orders. Go to Orders, select Export and choose the date range you need.
- Export inventory. From your inventory page, export current stock levels.
- Export redirects, discounts and gift cards. Use the export option in each section where your plan offers it.
- Store the files safely. Save everything in a dated folder outside Shopify, such as cloud storage your team can access.
Large exports may be emailed to the store owner rather than downloaded straight away. Product images aren’t included as files, only as URLs, so keep your original image files elsewhere as well.
Back up your theme
Go to Online Store > Themes, open the actions menu for your live theme and download the theme file, which Shopify sends to you by email. Before any theme edit, also duplicate the live theme and add the date to its name, so you can switch back quickly if something breaks.
Save what can’t be exported
Some parts of your store have no admin export. Pages, blog posts and navigation menus need a backup app, an import and export app or manual copies, while settings such as shipping rates, taxes, payment providers and notifications are easiest to document with screenshots and notes.
App data needs its own plan too. Reviews, subscriptions, loyalty points and similar data usually live with the app, so check each app’s export options and back them up separately.
Shopify Backup Apps
Backup apps automate the work, copying your store daily or as changes happen. They also make restores much simpler than re-importing files, and the table compares common options using details from each app’s Shopify App Store listing at the time of writing.
| App | Backup frequency | Data covered | Restore options | Pricing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rewind Backups | Automated daily and real-time, plus on demand | Products, themes, collections, customers, metafields and more | Single items, multiple items or the whole store | From $19 per month, based on monthly orders |
| Talon Backups | Every 24 hours, plus on demand | Themes, products, collections, blog posts and pages, with orders, customers and metafields on some plans | Single records or the store to a chosen date | From $9 per month, based on product count |
| BackupLABS | Daily, or twice daily on its Pro plan | Products, customers and orders | Individual or bulk item restores | Pricing scales with monthly orders |
Coverage varies more than frequency. Before choosing an app, confirm it backs up the data you care about most, how far back you can restore and whether you can restore a single item without overwriting newer changes.
Other Ways to Back Up Shopify Data
Import and export apps can also serve as backup tools, especially when you want your own files. Some, such as Firebear’s Import & Export Tool and Matrixify, can run exports on a schedule and cover more data types than the admin’s built-in exports.
Bulk data tools help with product data in particular. Bulkflow supports bulk import and export for Shopify, WooCommerce and Wix, so you can export selected store data as your own copy and import product data back or update existing records if you need to restore them.
Developers can also build custom backups with Shopify’s Admin API. This gives full control over what’s saved and where, but it needs ongoing maintenance and a tested restore process.
Shopify Backup Best Practices
A backup is only as good as your ability to restore from it. These habits keep your backups useful when you need them:
- Follow the 3-2-1 rule. Keep three copies of important data, on two different types of storage, with one stored off-site.
- Back up on a schedule. Match frequency to how often your store changes, with daily backups for busy stores.
- Back up before big changes. Take a fresh backup before bulk imports, theme edits, new apps or major promotions.
- Keep several versions. Older backups help when a problem goes unnoticed for days or weeks.
- Test restores. Restore a few items to a development store now and then to confirm your backups actually work.
- Protect backup files. Customer and order exports contain personal data, so store them securely and limit access.
Restoring From a Shopify Backup
How you restore depends on how you backed up. Backup apps restore items or roll back data from inside the app, while manual exports are re-imported through the admin’s product, customer and inventory imports.
Restore carefully either way. Export your store’s current state first, restore only what you need and check the results, since restoring old data can overwrite legitimate changes made since the backup.
Conclusion
A reliable Shopify backup combines the right method for each part of your store, from CSV exports and theme downloads to backup apps for automatic protection. Backing up on a schedule, before big changes, and testing your restores means a mistake costs you minutes instead of days. We hope this guide helps you build a Shopify backup routine that keeps your store safe. If you want simple bulk exports and imports of your store data, you can explore Bulkflow.
