Turbify Store Product Reviews Backup Add-On

The product reviews your customers leave in your store offer numerous benefits, including building trust, improving search engine ranking, increasing traffic, and helping you sell more, among others. Behind the scenes, reviews are stored in your store's MySQL database on hosting.

When all goes well, you simply collect these reviews and they improve your site on their own, with very minimal oversight (you, of course, have to read the reviews and decide, one by one, which one to allow to make its way to the store pages and which one to ditch, in order to weed out spam and/or unwanted reviews.)

However, glitches do happen, and we've seen cases where the database gets corrupted on hosting. When that happens, new reviews cannot get posted, and existing reviews may get lost. In our experience, in these cases, there are three outcomes:

1) Yahoo/Verizon support can fix the corruption on their end and everything goes back to normal.

2) Yahoo/Verizon support cannot fix the issue without resetting the database. In this case, we have to "scrape" the site and sort of reverse engineer the reviews data to restore the database.

3) In a worst case scenario, if the reviews haven't been posted back to the catalog (this can happen with older stores that don't use catalog manager), the reviews may get lost for good.

What Can You Do To Prevent This Loss?

You can log into your Web Hosting Control Panel, click on Create & Update, then MySQL Database, and create a backup. Once you have a backup, you can use it to restore your database in case a corruption happens. However, there is, unfortunately, no way to schedule this backup automatically, at least not in Verizon Small Business Essentials.

Since we've been asked by our merchants to resurrect reviews databases in a number of cases, we developed a backup function for our reviews system. This backup happens automatically. Depending how many reviews your products receive on a daily basis, we can schedule the backup to be as frequent as necessary to keep the amount of potential data loss to a minimum. If you currently have our reviews system we highly recommend that you get this upgrade. (And if you don't have our reviews, please click here to see how it could improve your store.)