How to make a backup of your eCommerce!

Last week we had two problems while we we’re importing on eCommerce platforms and I figured I had to say it publicly because it will really affect all those who have an eCommerce Website.You’ll be surprised, but no matter what e-commerce platform you use (Shopify, Prestashop, WooCommerce, Zoey or lightspeed.com), they do not offer backup of your website.

If you are in a hurry, go down further and you will have instructions on how to make a backup for Shopify,

What does it mean?

Well, we say: the backup, I will do it later and that is not really important …

However, if you delete a product. Let’s say you export your products to update it, you delete them before re-importing them up-to-date. Well, if you do that, your pictures will be gone from your website.

If you have a site like Zoey and you do not renew or you do not put your credit card number to keep the site running, they will delete all your data and it will disappear.

Same thing with Shopify.

E-commerce platforms do not backup your data.

So that’s why I decided to write this blog for you; To explain how to fix this situation!

This is a warning I am sending to you because it happened twice last week and I am convinced that it must happen to quite a few people who have Shopify sites or similar platforms.

Share this article with your friends who sell online because it’s really important: you have to backup your e-commerce platform and unfortunately it’s not automatic yet…

It will take discipline to make backups. You have to get reminders because if you do not, you risk losing everything you’ve done on your e-commerce platform.

How to do a backup with Magento, Prestashop and WooCommerce?

I gather these three platforms of eCommerce, because they are three platforms that you have to download.

To make a backup, nothing more simple:

First, you go on the FTP of your web hosting. Then you download all the files from your website.

Now you have to backup the database. You certainly have access to a app called PHPMyAdmin. Search on your cPanel, Plesk or on the management panel of your web hosting. Often, it’s in the “database” section.

Then click left on the database of your website. If there are more than one, repeat the next step for each one to avoid taking a chance.

At the top of the right part, click “Export” and save the export file somewhere on your computer.

How to make a Shopify backup?

As I said above, these hosted platforms are very practical and will make sure to have a backup of your current site in case their systems fail.

On the other hand, if you make a mistake: delete a product, a picture, forget to renew your package, decide to pause your online store … Well you lose all your data. Indeed, if you temporarily remove a product to export and reimport it, the pictures will be removed from their server without any way of retrieving them.

There are solutions, but they are not ideal.

On the Shopify documentation, you can see examples of backup for Shopify. However, this is not a complete backup.

If you follow their instructions, you will get a backup of products, orders, customers and collections.

On the other hand, you do not have backup of the pictures and configuration of your website. It does not seem a real problem to not have backup pictures, but imagine you have to connect all the photos to each product. It is a very long task.

If you have a few dollars a month to invest on a backup solution for Shopify, go for this application which will also take backup images and your theme.

Otherwise, if you just want to take a free backup for yourself, here’s how to download all the pictures:

1. Export your products to CSV (read the Shopify instructions)
2. Open the CSV file in Excel
3. If Excel does not divide the data correctly, go to “Data” then “Convert” and then choose the semicolon as the separator (or comma)
4. Then take the picture column and copy it into a new Excel sheet in column B
5. In column A of this new sheet, write curl -O followed by a space. Repeat for each line
6. Open a Terminal window (Applications, Utilities, Terminal) Enter this:

7. mkdir ~/Downloads/ShopifyBackup
   cd ~/Downloads/ShopifyBackup

8. Then copy and paste the column A and B in the terminal that you have selected at the same time in Excel so that your content looks like this:

9. curl -O http://www.balaams-ass.com/janben16.jpg
   curl -O http://www.balaams-ass.com/janben16.jpg
   curl -O http://www.balaams-ass.com/janben16.jpg
   curl -O http://www.balaams-ass.com/janben16.jpg
   curl -O http://www.balaams-ass.com/janben16.jpg
   curl -O http://www.balaams-ass.com/janben16.jpg
   curl -O http://www.balaams-ass.com/janben16.jpg
   curl -O http://www.balaams-ass.com/janben16.jpg
   curl -O http://www.balaams-ass.com/janben16.jpg
   curl -O http://www.balaams-ass.com/janben16.jpg
   curl -O http://www.balaams-ass.com/janben16.jpg
   curl -O http://www.balaams-ass.com/janben16.jpg
   curl -O http://www.balaams-ass.com/janben16.jpg
   curl -O http://www.balaams-ass.com/janben16.jpg
   curl -O http://www.balaams-ass.com/janben16.jpg
   curl -O http://www.balaams-ass.com/janben16.jpg

10. Press Enter!
11. All your photos will be downloaded in this folder.
12. Note: If you are on Windows: You will need to install CURL and copy it to your Path directory. The instructions are here.

How often do you do your backups?