Last week I went to upgrade my computer's backup system when I noticed a problem.
The disk my backups were stored on was showing errors and signs of corruption.
Long story short, that disk is going bad after a little over one year of use. It has a five year warranty so it shouldn't be having any issues at all yet.
Luckily my backup system has integrity checks and I have a couple of copies of the backups so I was able to recover and restore the backup system. But I did have to move everything off that disk and quickly before it failed.
It's times like these when I'm happy to have lost a major college paper to a disk failure years ago. That taught me the importance of backups and doing the boring but necessary work to maintain them.
Shopify has backups but they are for their systems (e.g. database, servers, etc). If something happened, it's unlikely they'll be able to recover something for a single store.
That's why I regularly recommend taking backups of your important store data and storing them someplace safe.
- Theme (which includes all of the code and customizations)
- Customer list
- Orders and payments
- Email list (might be outside of Shopify)
Also get data from any apps you use. A few categories will have a ton of data that you might miss with just a Shopify backup, e.g. reviews, returns, loyalty, analytics.
(This is why I made the data export in Repeat Customer Insights so robust. It includes not only the analyzed data but copies of the reports)
Do that on a regular schedule and then a data loss won't be as serious of an issue.
Eric Davis
P.S. An automated backup app can help too but it's also prone to errors or a failure so make sure to audit it and take your own backups too. Remember, my backup system was the think that had the problem and I wasn't aware of it until I looked.
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