Tutorial

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

Shopify has no undo button. Delete a product and it is gone; overwrite a price with a bad import and the old one is gone too. Lifeboat keeps a daily copy of your catalog and your stock so you can put things back.

1. Install

Install the app from the Shopify App Store and open it from Apps in your admin. There is no account to create and nothing to configure before it starts working.

Backups run once a day on their own schedule. A store that has just installed the app has none yet, so press Back up now to take the first one straight away rather than waiting for the daily run.

2. Check that a backup exists

The Backups list shows every snapshot: when it was taken, how many products and inventory items it holds, how many issues the check found, and its size.

To take one on the spot — before a bulk edit or a CSV import, for example — press Back up now and wait a few seconds for the new row to appear.

3. Turn on alerts

Under Alerts:

1. Enter the email address that should receive alerts
2. Tick Send alerts to this address — we cannot email you without it
3. Tick Email me the day it is found if you want same-day emails. Otherwise you get at most one email a week, listing whatever is priced at 0 when it is sent
4. Press Save

Every backup checks for active products priced at 0 — products a customer could order for free. When one is found you get a banner in the app and, if you enabled it, an email listing the affected products.

To stop the emails, clear the email address and save.

4. Restore a product

1. Find the backup you want in the Backups list and press Restore…
2. Stay on the Restore a product tab
3. Filter by title, tick the products you want back, and press Restore

Only the products you tick are touched. Everything else in your store is left alone.

5. Bring back a deleted product

Pick a backup from while the product still existed, tick it, and turn on Recreate if the product was deleted before pressing Restore.

Shopify gives the recreated product a new ID. Its details, variants, and collection membership come back. Its images do not — Shopify deletes the image files along with the product, so there is nothing left to link to.

A recreated product also starts out unpublished, so put it back on your sales channels once you have checked it over.

6. Restore stock levels

Restoring a product does not change your stock. Stock has its own tab, because putting numbers back into a live store is something you should do deliberately.

1. Press Restore… on the backup you want
2. Switch to the Restore inventory tab
3. Tick the variants you want to put back — filter by product name or SKU, or use Select all
4. Press Preview changes
5. Check the table, then press Restore

The preview shows the current quantity and the backed-up quantity for every variant and every location, so you can see exactly what is about to change before anything is written. Rows that already match are marked as unchanged and are left alone.

What to do if something looks wrong

• No backups in the list. The first one runs after you open the app. Press Back up now if you would rather not wait.
• A banner asks you to reconnect. Press the reconnect button; this renews the app's access to your store.
• A banner says your store has outgrown the free plan. Backups pause above the free product limit. Existing snapshots stay available until their retention window ends.
• You uninstalled and came back. Reinstall within 48 hours and your backups are still there. After that Shopify requires us to erase them, so the app starts over with a new first backup.
• A product restore reports a failure. The message names the product and the reason. Products that did restore are not rolled back — you can retry just the ones that failed.

More detail is in the FAQ. For anything else, use the support contact on the app's Shopify App Store listing.