Tidemark: Backup & Restore

How to undo a bad bulk edit or CSV import in Shopify

A CSV import overwrote your prices, or a bulk edit hit the wrong products. Here's how to limit the damage and put things back, with or without a backup.

First, stop the damage

If an app or a sync made the change, pause it before you fix anything, or it may make the same change again. If it was a CSV import, don't run the file again. Shopify can't cancel an import once it starts.

What Shopify keeps

Less than you'd hope. Products have no version history in Shopify, so there's no earlier version to roll back to, and Shopify doesn't keep a history of past imports. The store activity log (in Settings, under General) shows who changed a product, and sometimes which fields changed, but it doesn't record everything and it can't put anything back.

Stock is a partial exception: each product's inventory adjustment history lists every change and who made it, so you can see which counts to set back by hand.

Fix it from an export taken before the change

If you exported your products before the import or bulk edit, that file holds the values you want back, and Shopify can import it over your current products. First, trim the file so it only changes what broke:

  1. Delete every column that didn't break. Keep the handle and title columns, which Shopify requires, and the columns you want back, such as prices.
  2. If the broken values belong to variants, such as prices or SKUs, keep the option name and value columns too. Without them, Shopify deletes the product's variants and creates a single default one in their place.
  3. Leave out the inventory columns, so old stock counts can't overwrite the sales you've made since.
  4. Delete the rows of any product you don't want to change.
  5. Go to Products, click Import, choose the file and select Overwrite products with matching handles.

Two things to watch. A blank cell in a column you kept clears that value, so check that the columns you kept are filled in. And products added since the export aren't in the file, so they stay as they are.

No export? Then each product has to be fixed by hand, using the activity log to find what changed.

Next time: export first, test small

Export your products before every import or bulk edit, so you always have a copy to go back to. Shopify's Help Center gives the same advice: make sure you have a backup of your product data before you start an import. Then try the import on a few products, check them, and only then run the whole file.

With Tidemark: undo it in one step

Tidemark saves every change to your products within seconds, so it knows exactly what the import or bulk edit changed. Open the time machine, pick the window when it happened and roll back the products that changed in it. Stock comes back by the difference, so sales made since are kept.

If only one thing broke, restore just that part, such as prices, and leave the rest alone. And if you'd rather fix it with a file, download your products exactly as they were at any moment, as a CSV in Shopify's import format.

Tidemark can only undo changes it saw, so it needs to be installed before the import. From then on, its alerts flag an app or import that changes many items at once, so you hear about it before your customers do.

Tidemark is coming soon to the Shopify App Store. See what else it can undo.