webshop do I need a backup?

I have a webshop with shopify mountainherbs and a significant amount of work went in all the plant descriptions, pictures etc, I don't want to lose  it!
Now is it save to simply trust shopify that they do the backup or do I have to do my own backup? Is there an easy and free way? I add new plants and blogs every now and then.

Nice site!
I would be careful about using Shopify, however. There are stories about them shutting down people's websites without warning. Then, when the website owners ask for a reason, it seems they are often given a generic response. Here is one example where it is talked about:
https://ecommerce.shopify.com/c/shopify-discussion/t/sites-got-shut-down-for-no-reason-483228
And another:
https://ecommerce.shopify.com/c/shopify-discussion/t/banned-from-stripe-shopify-s-payments-gateway-new-customers-beware-430599

Since one of the categories of your plants is specifically called "medicinal", it could be that may be a red flag for Shopify. Just to give you a heads up.

It is one of the reasons woocommerce/wordpress is recommended for websites. No one to make a judgement to possibly shut down your site (except government, of course, should someone be doing illegal things on or with the site).

Yes, always have an off-site, third-party backup.

I've not used shopify. I would enquire with them directly. Ask them about third-party backup solutions. The ease with which you can export your data is a good indication of how confident shopify is with their service. If shopify tries to lock down your content (which is your intellectual property), that means they probably have no confidence in their service and want to make it as difficult as possible for you to leave. That's not a statement of fact, just a good rule of thumb.

Once you are able to export your data, investigate how you might go about importing the data into some other CMS. The format they export the data in might not have any regard for ease of forward porting.

Annie Collins is correct regarding WordPress. It's an open source project and you're permitted to use and alter it for any reason you wish. There's also dozens of backup solutions for WordPress and thousands of professional developers around the world that can basically solve any problem you could ever have.

There are apps you pay for and these do that automatically. If you do it manually from shopify ( I think with excel??) then the pictures are lost. It sounds as if I have to pay for a service??
It all adds up.
I did choose shopify because you can make a nice looking site with virtuall knowledge. I am interested in plants and not in computers, but I still enjoy working on my site when its raining...

It looks like the Talon plugin saves images. The price isn't bad, either.

**EDITED** Yeah, nah. $9 US/month if over 100 products. That's a bit much. Rewind looks like a better deal at $5/month.

Angelika Maier wrote:It sounds as if I have to pay for a service?? It all adds up.

Indeed it does. You should view it as an insurance plan.

Your investment in "insurance" should be pegged to the amount the site is generating. At first, go with the free "excel" method, then grow into the paid backup solutions as your income (and potential loss) grows.

Thanks I have a look into these options. DO I have the files with the paid method on my computer? I really prefer getting answers from here rather than from the shopify forum since there are too many people wanting to earn money.

Angelika Maier wrote:DO I have the files with the paid method on my computer?

Unfortunately I have no idea.

Skimming through the Rewind product description, I'd have to say no. It looks like they save everything to their cloud service. The good part is this allows them to offer the versioned backups and (most likely) quick performance. The bad news is that now you've just shifted the point of failure to yet another third party out of your control.

FWIW, providing business continuity and disaster recovery has been one of my main hats for the last 20 years. I do backups of all my stuff as well as for commercial clients. Some use cloud hosting, but many live on a mirrored set of disks here on premises. My preference is to use simple utilities like rsync, and then write small scripts to automate the process. The problem with solutions like Shopify is that they are often opaque to this approach because there's no shell access and we can't directly work with the database and filesystem. They instead have API methods to expose what's required, albeit in a roundabout way, and this is most likely how the app providers are doing it.

Writing the code to interact with Shopify's API for a DIY backup could be done, but for a single user it wouldn't make sense from a cost/benefit standpoint unless you wanted to hack on it as a personal project. This is why open source solutions, like Wordpress with one of the popular ecommerce plugins, give you control and flexibility: you can opt for a turnkey hosted setup, with third-party modules to do all the housekeeping, or you can host it yourself and use generic tools to manage things like replication and backups. Or just about any combination in between.

Phil you are most probably right about wordpress. It is said to be much more difficult to use. I am really happy with shopify apart from this and the fact that I have to pay in USD. I have to admit that many of the words you use I don't understand. It is somehow silly to backup from one cloud to the other. I probably go for the text only version, still it would be a lot of work replacing several hundred pictures.

Angelika Maier wrote:It is somehow silly to backup from one cloud to the other.

It's actually very common. Just remember that there is no "cloud", just someone else's computer.