How do I back up my design files, and what will be lost if I change themes?

CoreCommerce will backup your store daily and keep 14 days worth of backups. If you are ever in a position to need us to restore your design or data, CoreCommerce will quote you a fee to bring the data back from the backups, if you request data within 14 days of losing it.

As an alternative, CoreCommerce recommends you keep a local backup of all your data and design content.

To do this, login to your CoreCommerce FTP Account by going to

  >  FTP
 

If you do not have an FTP client, here are some FREE FTP clients for you to choose from, along with a tutorial on how to use an FTP client if you are unfamiliar.

Once you have logged into your FTP server, you will see several different folders:

Example FTP Client

Below is a screen capture of FTP client, Filezilla, and how it looks when connected to your CoreCommerce store.

On the left will be the files from your local computer, and on the right will be the files on the FTP server.

On the left, select the file or directory in which you want the server files to be saved in. On the right you will want to highlight every file/directory you see. Download all of those files into your local directory. This will save everything to your computer.

Will all of my data transfer from one theme to another?

When you switch a theme, all of your data will be retained. For example, product info, product images, categories, customers, orders, and settings.

There are pieces of data or settings that will NOT carry over from template to template:

  • Homepage Content
  • Navigation Choice
  • Google Analytics Code
  • Widget Layout
  • Image Size Settings

 

Homepage Content

For the homepage content, it is IMPERATIVE that you backup the TOP and BOTTOM HTML to your local computer, and keep it. If you ever switch themes, you will need to paste this content back into the CoreCommerce Homepage settings.

Site Content (left-hand menu) > Manage Homepage 



Navigation Choice

All of the navigation HTML and default selections are specific to the theme that is active, so when you change templates, it will default to the Standard Navigation Menu with the standard choices.

So if you use the Standard Menu, you have to re-enter the navigation choices. However, if you use either "Drop Down", "Mega Menu", you just have to re-enable it by clicking on it, and save. It will retain all of that menu HTML and re-use it. You do not have to rebuild the entire menu. But you may need to tweak the CSS in the new theme to accommodate the menu, depending on the content.

Design > Navigation

Google Analytics Code

You will need to keep this snippet of code saved somewhere, as when you switch themes, it cannot be copied over, and must be re-entered into the Google Analytics settings screen

 Settings > Plug-In Apps > Google Analytics

Widget Layout

The order of the widgets will reset back to the default for the theme you select. So its important to make a note of the widgets and where you want them, so you can easily drag them back where you want them.

Design > Sidebar Widgets 

Image Size Settings

The size options for images will reset to the default settings for that theme when you switch, so make sure you have a note as to what the image settings are before switching themes (if you changed them), so you can quickly set them back to what you want.

 > Inventory Settings > Images