FAQ

Lifeboat — Backup & Restore — Last updated: 2026-09-02

What does Lifeboat back up?

Once a day, Lifeboat takes a snapshot of your product catalog and your inventory quantities. Each snapshot includes:

• Product fields: title, handle, status, vendor, product type, tags, description, SEO title and description, theme template, category, and product metafields
• Options and option values. If an option is linked to a metafield, the link is recorded in the backup but is not written back when you restore — see below
• Variant fields: price, compare-at price, SKU, barcode, taxable, inventory policy, and position
• Variant inventory attributes: unit cost, weight, HS code, country and province of origin, and whether the variant requires shipping
• Available inventory quantities, recorded per location
• Which collections a product belongs to

What does Lifeboat not back up?

Images and videos, themes, orders, customers, pages, blogs, discounts, and translations are not included. Lifeboat covers your product catalog and your stock levels, and nothing else.

Image files are the deliberate exception. Shopify removes the underlying files when a product is deleted, so storing only a link would not bring them back. Storing the files themselves is not something this app does.

What comes back when I restore a product?

Everything in the list above except images, inventory quantities, collection membership, and metafield-linked options. Restoring a product puts its details back; it does not change your stock. Stock is restored separately, from the Restore inventory tab.

Three things need explaining:

• Collection membership is left alone. Restoring never adds a product to a collection or removes it from one. This is deliberate: writing the saved list back would delete any collection the product was added to after the backup was taken. Collection membership is restored only when a deleted product is recreated, where there is nothing to overwrite.
• An option linked to a metafield comes back as a plain option. The values are restored, but the link to the metafield is not, so you would need to link it again.
• Stock is never touched by a product restore, even for a variant whose quantity changed.

Restoring is a rollback to the day you picked. That means variants, options, and tags you added after that backup are removed, because they were not part of the product on that day. The app tells you this before you confirm.

Does restoring delete anything I added later?

Custom fields (metafields) are never deleted. Lifeboat writes back the values it saved and leaves anything added since then alone, including metafields owned by your other apps.

Fields owned by another app (the app-- namespace) cannot be written by Lifeboat and are skipped.

Can I bring back a product I deleted?

Yes. Pick a backup taken while the product still existed and choose Recreate if the product was deleted. Shopify assigns the product a new ID, so its details, variants, and collection membership come back.

Two things do not come back, and you will need to set them again: images, and which sales channels the product is published to. A recreated product starts unpublished, so make it available on your channels once it is back.

How is inventory restored?

Open a backup, switch to the Restore inventory tab, and tick the variants you want to put back. You can filter by product name or SKU, and select everything at once.

Before anything is written, Lifeboat shows you exactly what will change: the current quantity and the backed-up quantity, for every variant and every location. Rows that already match are marked as unchanged, and rows that cannot be restored are listed with the reason. Nothing is written until you confirm.

If stock moves between the preview and your confirmation, that row is not overwritten. Lifeboat tells Shopify the quantity it expects to find, so a sale that lands in between makes the write fail rather than silently undoing it. This is what stops a restore from re-inflating stock you have already sold.

Variants are matched by their inventory record, not by SKU, so a variant with no SKU or a SKU shared with another variant restores like any other. The one exception is a product that was deleted and recreated: its inventory records are new, so Lifeboat falls back to matching by SKU. For those, a missing or duplicated SKU means the variant is reported rather than guessed at.

Locations that were not in the backup are skipped rather than guessed at, and locations that were in the backup but no longer exist are skipped too. Both appear in the preview.

What is the zero-price alert?

Every backup checks for active products where a variant price is 0. A product priced at 0 can be ordered for free until someone notices, and Shopify has no built-in check for it.

When the check finds one, the app shows a banner and can email you the list. Add your email address under Alerts and tick the consent box; leave the address empty to stop the emails.

The check looks at product status, not sales channels, so a product that is Active but not published to any channel is still reported.

What does the "Issues found" number mean?

It is the number of active products where the backup spotted something worth a second look. Three things are counted:

• A variant priced at 0 — this is the one that also triggers the banner and the email
• Every tracked variant out of stock — the product is active but cannot be bought. Variants set to keep selling when out of stock are not counted
• No product image

Press View next to the number to see which products were flagged and why. Each one links straight to the product in your admin.

Only the zero-price findings are emailed, so the number here can be higher than the number of products in the alert. Draft and archived products are never counted.

How often does the backup run?

Once a day, automatically. You can also take one at any time with Back up now. The zero-price check runs with every backup.

A store that has just installed the app has no backups yet, because the automatic run happens on its own daily schedule rather than at install time. If you would rather not wait for it, press Back up now — the result appears in the list within a minute.

What is the difference between the plans?

How long a backup is kept is decided when it is taken, so upgrading does not extend backups you already have — it applies to the ones taken from then on.

The weekly email is a frequency limit rather than a digest: it lists whatever is priced at 0 at the time it is sent, not everything found during the week.

What happens if my store grows past the free limit?

Backups stop and the app shows a banner. Snapshots taken before that point stay available for the rest of their retention window, and backups resume as soon as you upgrade or bring the catalog back under the limit.

Are there stores Lifeboat cannot handle?

Very large catalogs can take longer than a single run allows. If a backup fails several days in a row, the app stops queueing it and we are alerted so we can look into it. Please get in touch if your backups stop.

What happens to my backups if I uninstall?

Uninstalling revokes the app's access to your store immediately, and daily backups stop. Your existing snapshots stay for a short while: Shopify tells us to erase your data 48 hours after an uninstall, and at that point every snapshot is permanently deleted — both the stored contents and the list of backups.

So if you reinstall within 48 hours, your backups are still there and you can restore from them. After that window there is nothing left to restore, and the app starts over with its first new backup. This is a Shopify requirement, not a setting we can change.

Snapshots are also deleted once their retention window ends, whether or not you uninstall. See the privacy policy for the full details.

How do I get help?

Use the support contact on the app's Shopify App Store listing. Please include your store domain and, if the question is about a restore, the date of the backup you used.