Schedule repeated Shopify Activity log backup with Matrixify

The Shopify Activity log records who did what in your store – which user or app created, updated or deleted Products, Orders, Collections and other data. Shopify keeps these events for about a year. Since January 27, 2026 the API does not return anything older than that, and the Admin store activity log page shows only the last 250 events with no export. If you need the Activity history for longer, you have to export it yourself before it disappears.

Here we will set up a Matrixify Activity export that runs every month by itself, exports the previous month, and saves each file with a name you can find later in the All Jobs page.

Steps in short

1. Create a new export with the Activity sheet.
2. Filter it by Created At – relative date – last 1 month.
3. Schedule it to run on the 1st of each month and set a custom file name.
4. Press Schedule, and run one more export without filters for the history you already have.
5. Find the backup files in All Jobs.

1. Create a new Activity export

In the Matrixify app Home create a new Export by using the New Export button.

• In the Format section select Matrixify: Excel. For very busy stores with hundreds of thousands of events per month select Matrixify: CSV – it has no row limit.
• Press Select Sheets and select Activity.
• Click on the Activity sheet card to expand it and select the Basic Columns column group.

2. Filter Activity by Created At

Without a filter, each monthly run would export everything Shopify still has – up to a year of events – and you would get the same events again in every file. We want each file to contain only the month that just ended. For that we add a date filter on the Created At column.

In the Activity sheet card press the Filter button and add this filter:

• Filter – Created At
• Condition – relative date
• Value – 1 months

Press Add.

The relative date condition works with full time units. “Last 1 months” means the last full calendar month, and the current month, which is still in progress, is not included. So when the export runs on October 1st, it exports all events from September 1st to September 30th, and nothing from October. The app calculates this each time the job runs, so every month picks up the month before it, and the files do not overlap.

Do not add other filters here – for a backup you want all events. You can filter the file in Excel later if needed.

3. Set up scheduling and file name

So far this is a one-time export. To make it run every month by itself, and to give each file a name you can recognize later, scroll down to the Options section.

1. Select Schedule on and set the date to the 1st day of next month. Pick a quiet time, for example 02:00 (in your store time zone).
2. Select Repeat every and set it to 1 month, until cancelled.
3. In Custom file name enter Activity-Backup_%Y-%m-%d.
4. Optional – if you use Matrixify in several stores, add %{shop_subdomain}_ in front of the name.
5. Optional – set Upload file to if you also want a copy of each file on your own FTP/SFTP server. Files always stay available in All Jobs anyway.

Starting on the 1st matters because of how the filter works – if the job runs on the 1st, “last 1 months” is exactly the previous calendar month. The job then repeats on the 1st of every following month.

About the file name. Without a custom name all exports are called Export_ plus the date and time, which is hard to tell apart after a year of monthly jobs. The %Y, %m and %d placeholders are replaced with the date when the export starts, so the run on October 1st will be named Activity-Backup_2026-10-01.xlsx. Note that the date in the name is when the export ran, and that file contains September events.

4. Schedule the export

Press Schedule at the bottom of the page. Because the job has a Schedule on date, it will not run now. The app keeps it as a scheduled job and starts it at the date and time you set. On the Home page you will see how many scheduled jobs you have, and clicking on that opens All Jobs.

One more thing. The scheduled job only covers the months from now on – it does not export what happened before its first run. To also save the history Shopify still has, make one more export right away with the Activity sheet and Basic Columns, no filters, and a custom file name like Activity-Backup_Full-History_%Y-%m-%d. Press Export. The oldest events drop off every day, so it is better not to wait with this one.

5. Find backup files in All Jobs

Every monthly run is a separate job in the All Jobs page, with its own exported file, so over time you will have one job per month. The scheduled job is also listed there with a “Scheduled” bubble and a calendar icon showing the next run date. You can cancel it from here when you no longer need it.

Click on a file name to download it.

To see only the backups, enter Activity-Backup in the All Jobs search bar. The search is kept in the page URL, so you can bookmark that page and open the list of backups directly whenever you need a file.

Open any job to see when it ran, what filters and options it had, how many events were exported, and the Download Exported File button. The Excel file also has an “Export Summary” sheet with the job ID, in case you have a file and want to find its job.

Good to know!

• Activity is export-only – it cannot be imported back to Shopify.
• For weekly files set Repeat every to 1 week and the filter to relative date – 1 weeks. Start it on a Monday.
• Matrixify keeps exported files without a time limit by default. If you have turned on Rolling erasure of job files in Settings, your backups will be deleted on that schedule too – then use Upload file to to keep a copy on your server.
• You can save this setup as an Export Preset to run the same export manually when needed.
• The Shopify Admin store activity log and this export show the same events. The Admin page just shows the last 250 of them.