An introduction to using Theme Shield

Using Theme Shield to backup your themes

Theme Shield is the easiest way to automatically backup your Store themes.

No configuration is needed - after it’s synchronized your theme for the first time, Theme Shield will take care of the rest and run automatic backups of your themes.

Selecting the appropriate Theme Shield plan

We provide a few different options for you to select from, depending on what is appropriate to your business.

If you just want to try things out - use the Free trial plan to see how it all works. This is not automatic, and you will need to manually backup your theme.

You can find all the details on the Account page, and you’ll need to decide whether you want to back up all of your themes or just your live published one, how frequently you want the automatic backups to run, how many versions of each theme you want to retain, and how long you want those to be retained for.

If you’d like a long term and complete backup solution, jump on ‘The Goods’ plan, and we’ll store everything forever! 

What Theme Shield syncs, and when

Changes to themes can be quite wide ranging, and so we sync slightly different things at different times.

Full, immediate synchronizations

If you create a new theme, or duplicate, rename or delete, an existing theme; we’ll automatically start an instant synchronization of that theme.

If you click the ‘Sync with Shopify’ button on the Configuration page, Theme Shield will synchronize your current live published theme. If you are on a paid plan, you can optionally select to also sync your unpublished themes at the same time.

Because these are full synchronizations of all theme files you may need to wait a few minutes for that to complete while Theme Shield processes your theme assets.

Automatic changed files updates

If you make any other changes to your theme, such as changing your styles or templates or adding new assets, in the next scheduled automatic backup, Theme Shield will process your theme files to identify those which have changed.

If any have, new versions of those files will be created within Theme Shield, and you’ll be able to compare it with previous versions. If you’d like to see changes more quickly, perform a manual re-synchronization, but bear in mind it may take a few minutes.

Theme Timeline

Your theme Timeline shows a list of changes to all synchronized themes.

You can see whether or not it’s live and the most recent action - a full sync or a changed files update.

If details in a theme have changed, we show a brief summary, and from your Timeline, you can choose to explore a particular version or restore it.

Browse themes

A list of the themes Theme Shield is tracking and synchronized with, and we show some simple summary information on the theme and the most recent changes.

You can explore the theme to check the source code and changes.

Exploring themes

When you are exploring themes, at the top of the page, we’ll show you summary information, and a version selector.

You can optionally choose to compare theme versions to see which files have changed between them, and we show the Theme Timeline below for easy reference.

By default, Theme Shield shows you the changed assets for the currently viewed version. You can change this by clicking the ‘changed assets’ link, and adjusting the Type and Status as you need.

You can click to view an asset to check the code, and while viewing it, you can compare it with other versions of the same file and easily see what has changed.

Restoring themes

You can use Theme Shield to restore either a previous version of an entire theme, or an individual file within a theme.

If you want to restore an entire theme, you do that from one of the ‘Restore’ links while viewing it. This will create a new unpublished theme in your Store, which you can then review and publish when you are happy.

If you want to restore an individual file, you do that while viewing the file and clicking the ‘Restore this version’ button. When you do that, the file will immediately be replaced in the Shopify theme. So if you restore a file in your current live published theme, that will be immediately updated.