If you have a Shopify store, all of its items, inventory counts, and product prices can be edited and deleted at any time. When these important data records are lost, you might lose sales from first-time visitors, or products that were previously offered.
How to backup your data?
There are a variety of ways that can help you backup your Shopify data. You can manually download CSV files from Shopify. Alternatively, you can utilize third-party tools to back up data automatically instead of manually storing data. Even if you are a coder, you can write a script to retrieve data from Shopify API directly.
Before choosing a suitable tool to backup your data, you can think of the following things:
- How large is your data? How many orders does your store generate every month?
- How often do you want to backup your data? Do you need to keep different versions of your data?
- Do you need to backup your data automatically?
- Do you already have a database or a data warehouse?
- In addition to data backup, do you have other needs, such as analysis, for Shopify data?
- Do you need to integrate Shopify data with other integrations?
Generally, there are four methods to backup your data in the market:
Method 1: Export data as CSV files manually
One way to backup your data is to go to your Shopify account and export data as CSV files manually. Then, store data in your local folder or cloud storage. The data that can be downloaded includes customers, products, themes, orders, discount codes, gift cards, and financial data. This method is simple and you can do it by yourself without any third-party tools.
However, there is a lot of labor. First, for each type of data, you have to navigate to their pages and export data separately. Second, CSV files won’t update automatically, so you have to remember to back up data once in a while. Thus, you need to do the entire process repeatedly. In addition, if your data is very large, say over 1 million rows, each CSV file can occupy a lot of space in your local folder or cloud storage.
Method 2: ETL tools
Another method is to use ETL tools, such as Fivetran or Xplenty, to retrieve your Shopify data and save it in another place. These tools can export all data at a time and automate the process at a certain time interval, such as every day or every month. Since the purpose of ETL tools is to load data into databases, they typically don’t provide a server host. That means you need to have your own database or data warehouse in order to store your Shopify data. Moreover, it’s not easy to have several versions for the same data. Once data is written to your database, it is difficult to restore the old version of the data.
Method 3: Shopify Backup apps
There are some backup apps in Shopify App, such as Rewind or BackupMaster. They can back up your data every day and keep previous versions of the data as well. You can restore a specific record to the previous version anytime.
However, these apps charge based on usage. It starts from a low price, but the price grows obviously as the number of new orders increases. Especially, if your store has over 2000 orders within a month, you may have to pay hundreds of dollars a month to back up your data.
Method 4: Cloud data management tools
If your data is large and you don’t have a database, you can consider using cloud data management tools, such as Acho, to backup your data. Cloud data management tools are popular in recent years. They utilize the advantage of cloud computing, so they can process big data very fast and allow businesses to store data more efficiently.
Like backup tools, cloud data management tools are able to store data and automate the backup process as well. Yet, the difference is that cloud data management tools are more flexible and support other data needs. For example, you can connect to third-party tools other than Shopify, such as CRM software, and centralize all data from different sources in the same place. You can also use built-in analytical or visualization tools to grasp insights from your Shopify data.
In addition, many database management systems have feature-based pricing plans that do not penalize usage. If your store has millions of records, it would make a lot more economic sense to go with a feature-based pricing subscription compared to usage-based plans.
Steps for backing up your data
Now I will use Acho Studio as an example to demonstrate how to back up Shopify data automatically.
1. Connect to your Shopify account and select the tables that you want to back up
2. Create a new project and import the Shopify tables to the project
3. Go to the Data Sync page and specify the frequency of the updater for the table that you just imported to the project.
4. You can create several projects and set up different schedulers to store different versions of your data.
The main advantage of backing up your data in a cloud DB management tool is that you can access each record conveniently without worrying about what went missing and what changed.
Hope this article helps. Contact us in the chatbox if you have any questions.
