Automatic Shopify backups with scheduled exports

Shopify is very good at not losing your store. It's not a time machine: if an app rewrites 4,000 product descriptions this morning, there's no button that puts last night's version back. A scheduled export is that button.

What to back up

• Products — the one everyone regrets not having.
• Collections, including the rules behind smart collections.
• Customers, if your marketing depends on them.
• Metafields, which are easy to overwrite and painful to reconstruct.

A schedule that's enough

Daily is plenty for most stores; hourly if you're running frequent automated updates. Send it somewhere that isn't your laptop — Google Drive or an S3 bucket both work, and both keep the file version history that makes a backup worth having.

Test the restore, not the backup

A backup you've never restored is a guess. Once, take yesterday's file, change one product in it, and import it back. Now you know the loop works and roughly how long it takes — which is exactly what you want to know on the day something goes wrong.

Set the file retention in Settings to match how far back you'd realistically want to go. Keeping every export forever isn't useful; keeping the last month usually is.