Mirror or keep: the one choice every clone asks you to make

Your staging store probably has things your live store doesn't: a test product, an old collection, a page from a project that never shipped. A clone asks what to do with them. Here's how the two options differ.

· 3 min read

Keep: the safe default for most clones

Keep leaves staging-only records exactly where they are. Your live store's products, collections and content arrive or update, and whatever staging already had stays alongside them. Nothing is ever removed. If you're not sure which one you need, this is it.

Mirror: staging becomes a true copy

Mirror goes further: after the clone, anything that exists only in staging and not in your live store is removed, so staging matches Production exactly. This only runs for resource types that copied without a single failed or skipped record, a backup is taken first, and you confirm the destination domain before anything is deleted.

Sync preview in Cartsella Studio with records to create, update, conflicts to resolve and staging-only records kept

What the backup actually gives you

Every record Mirror removes is backed up before it's deleted — the record itself, its files, and its metafields. "Restore removed records" brings it all back in one click, or "Export backup (.xlsx)" saves it as a Matrixify file you can open in Excel, for products, pages, blog posts and redirects.

A sync is different

A sync never removes staging-only records, whichever setting your last clone used. Mirror's clean-up only ever happens as part of a clone, and only when you choose it.

Choose what happens to your test data.

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Read next: Nothing lost: backups, restore and Excel export · How clone & sync works