Backups and restoring

What to back up

The database

Products, orders, customers and settings. Everything that matters.

The storage bucket

Product photos and uploads.

Your .env file

Especially AUTH_SECRETS_KEY. Without the same key, staff two-factor and saved webhook secrets can't be read.

Your shop file

The your-shop.json you created the shop with.

You don't need to back up Meilisearch or imgproxy. Search is rebuilt from the database, and imgproxy keeps nothing.

Back up

1. 1

   Dump the database

   A compressed dump you can restore anywhere:

   Terminal

   $ pg_dump -Fc -d "$DATABASE_URL" -f shop-$(date +%F).dump

2. 2

   Copy the bucket

   Copy the bucket to somewhere else, with any S3 tool. With the MinIO client, for example:

   Terminal

   $ mc mirror --overwrite shop/shop-media backup/shop-media

   A versioned backup bucket also keeps photos that were deleted or replaced.

3. 3

   Keep copies somewhere else

   Store the dump, the bucket copy, .env and your shop file away from the server, and keep more than one day's worth.

Restore

1. 1

   Restore the database

   Terminal

   $ pg_restore --clean --if-exists --no-owner \    --role=shop -d "$DATABASE_URL" shop-2026-10-18.dump

2. 2

   Restore the bucket

   Copy the photos back. Use a bucket backup from the same day as the database, so every product's photos are there.

3. 3

   Start the app and rebuild search

   Start the container as usual, then rebuild the search index:

   Terminal

   $ docker exec vexon-commerce npm run search:reindex

Check a backup works

A backup you haven't restored is a guess. Every so often, restore the latest dump into a spare database and check the numbers of products, variants and orders match the live shop. For photos, restore a few files to a spare bucket and open them.