Sharetribe does not believe in locking in its customers. Data is yours to take, and you can request a full export (backup) of your marketplace data.
How can I ask for a backup?
Creating the backup requires some manual action from the Sharetribe team. Please give the team a few days to fulfill the backup request. If you'd like the backup operation to be started on a certain date, please inform Sharetribe support in advance.
The best way to get the backup is to contact Sharetribe support via the chat widget at the bottom right of your Admin panel. If you contact us by email, be sure to use the same email address as your marketplace's admin account.
What is and what isn't in that backup?
The backup consists of a Zip archive that contains all marketplace data. All listing pictures, profile pictures, Stripe Connect accounts IDs and the complete database (SQL dump) are part of the backup.
There are, however, a few things not included by default.
We don't export (hashed) user passwords by default to help reduce the risk of password hashes being compromised for security reasons. If you want to start hosting the Community Edition of Sharetribe Go on your own server from the backup data, your users will need to reset their passwords using the "Password forgotten" link. Users who log in via Facebook Login are not affected by this as long as you keep using the same Facebook App. If you specifically ask for it, hashed passwords can be exported.
We also won't export the PayPal Channel Billing Agreements IDs as they are considered private and useless outside the context of our hosted platform and our private API access.
In marketplaces with many listings and images, in particular large images, some images might not be downloaded properly.
Finally, the security certificate (SSL) won't be shared as it contains private information.
You can also request a backup without images if you are only interested in the database (SQL dump).
Do I really need a backup?
We host your marketplace and all its data with great caution. The data is stored in multiple secure locations. If something goes wrong, we can always restore the data from backups. There is no need to ask for a backup as a security precaution—Sharetribe does it on your behalf!
How can I import the data export to a MySQL database?
You can find full instructions on how to access your marketplace data export in this article. Please note that the instructions are currently only available for macOS but will be made available for Windows in the future.
On other platforms, as a nutshell guide to getting started, you can import the provided MySQL dump file contents to a MySQL database on the command line with something like this:mysql -u database_username -p name_of_the_database_where_you_want_to_import < your_marketplace_export.sql
Where you replace the names for the user, the database, and the file with ones that match your situation.
Remember that managing your own database requires that you know what you are doing. One of the key benefits of the hosted Sharetribe service is that you don't need to manage your own database and backups.