Backup your Shopify Site

shopify knowledge shopify-help

Shopify backs up your data regularly,

http://docs.shopify.com/support/other/general-information/how-do-i-duplicate-my-store

however the issue is that it will back up mistakes/ acts of employee malice/accidents as well.

Therefore I’d suggest doing a weekly backup of

Theme - download zip file

admin/themes

Products – export

Admin/products

Customers – export

Admin/customers

Orders – export

Admin/orders

What isn’t easily exported

Collection structure
Navigation structure
Images
Pages

To copy the collection and navigation structure so you can at least manually re-create it, go into admin/collections and admin/navigation and copy and paste that information into a text document and save it. This shouldn’t change regularly, so only needs infrequent backup.

To save Images and Pages I’d suggest buying a backup hard drive ($100 ish from Office Works) and running a tool like A1 Website Download – that backs up the actual ‘generated’ version of the website, including the page text and images, which can be used for recreation of the site in the event of a serious failure (I’ve never had a failure that serious occur on a Shopify site, but this is how to prepare for it).

I’d suggest having two folders – this month’s backup and last month’s backup, and simply rotating between them. You’d be unlikely to need an older backup than that.

Access review

In addition to doing regular backups, do a regular review of who has access, and limit their access to what they really need to use.

You can do this by going to admin/settings/account and deleting out old users, or using the instructions in the access document to limit their access to areas of the site necessary for their jobs.

How to make sure it happens
Add the explicit list of backup tasks + access reviews and frequencies to job descriptions and performance reviews.
Add the task to diary as a recurring task
CHECK it is happening