Brainerce HelpBackups and restore
Export a full or partial snapshot of your store, schedule automatic backups, and restore missing data from a backup file.
Settings → Backup does two jobs: it takes snapshots of your store data, and it puts data back if something goes missing.
The most important thing to know before you use it: restore is additive. It only creates items that aren't in your store any more. It never changes or deletes anything you already have. You cannot use restore to roll your store back to an earlier state. It is a safety net for deletions, not an undo button.
Take a backup now
- Go to Settings → Backup.
- In the Export card, click Export Data.
- Choose Include everything for a complete snapshot, or pick individual sets of data.
- Choose the Export Format: JSON (use this if you might restore it) or CSV (use this to open in a spreadsheet).
- Click Start Backup.
The backup runs in the background. When it finishes it appears in Backup History, where you can Download or Delete it.
You can keep five backups. When a sixth completes, the oldest is deleted automatically to make room. Download anything you want to keep for longer.
What you can include
A full backup covers products (with variants, prices, attributes and modifiers), orders, customers, categories, tags, brands, coupons, discount rules, shipping zones and carriers, regions, tax rates, metafield definitions, email templates, store settings, sales-channel connections, loyalty, order bumps and bundles, the storefront bot, SEO Autopilot, warehouses, content, and installed apps.
Credentials are never exported. Carrier connections and installed apps come out with their settings and scopes but no access tokens or secrets, so after a restore you reconnect them by hand. This is deliberate: a backup file is not a place to keep keys.
Schedule automatic backups
In the Scheduled Backups card, switch on Enable scheduled backups and choose:
- Frequency: Daily, Weekly, or Monthly.
- Day of week or Day of month, depending on the frequency.
- Retention: 7 days, 30 days, 90 days, or 1 year. Scheduled backups are deleted automatically once they pass this age.
Click Save schedule. The first one runs shortly after you enable it.
All times are UTC, not your store's timezone. A "daily" backup on an Israeli store runs in the small hours of the morning local time, which is usually what you want anyway.
To stop future backups, click Remove schedule. Existing backups are kept.
Restore from a backup
- In the Restore from backup card, click Restore from backup.
- Drag in a Brainerce backup file, or click to browse. It must be a
.zipproduced by this feature, no bigger than 16 MB. A larger file is refused on the spot with a message that says so; it is never uploaded in part. - Brainerce reads the file and shows you what it found, including which store it came from. A file that is cut off or unreadable fails here, before anything is written, and your store is left exactly as it was.
- Under Choose what to restore, tick the kinds of data you want back.
- Click Restore now.
Ticking Products cannot overwrite your products. Nothing you select can change or delete an item you already have. Selecting a data type only permits restore to re-create the ones that are missing from it. A product that still exists is skipped, every time, whatever the backup file says about it.
When it finishes you get a summary: how many items were created, how many were skipped, and how many failed.
Why items get skipped
Skipping is normal, and usually it means there was nothing to do:
| Reason | What it means |
|---|---|
| Already exist | The item is still in your store, so restore left it alone. |
| Not selected | You didn't tick that kind of data. |
| Missing a linked item | The thing it belongs to is gone, for example a variant whose product wasn't restored. Restore that parent first, then run the restore again. |
| Archived | The item was soft-deleted rather than removed. |
| Not supported | Some kinds of data can be exported but not yet restored automatically. The restore screen names them explicitly. |
If you see Nothing to restore, every item in the file is already present. That is a good sign, not an error.
What backups are not
- Not an undo. Restore cannot revert an edit, a price change, or a bad import. It only puts back what is missing.
- Not a way to move stores. A backup carries the store it came from; use the Migration Tool app to bring a catalog in from another platform.
- Not a secrets store. Reconnect carriers, payment providers and apps yourself after restoring.
Who can do this
The Backup page is visible to everyone on your team. Treat that as a reason to be deliberate about who you invite. See Team and permissions.
What's next?
- Team and permissions controls who can reach your store's settings.
- Suspending or deleting your store covers the other two irreversible actions in Settings.