Back up your TPT store in an afternoon

What only lives on TPT

Your resource files are on your computer. What tends to exist only on TPT is everything you typed into the listing form: titles, descriptions, prices, grade and subject tags, the thumbnails and previews you made for each product, your ratings and reviews, your sales history, and your store’s own bio and images. None of that is secret. It is on your public product pages, which means you can copy it without signing in and without any tool that needs your password.

You keep the rights to all of it. TPT’s terms say sellers retain the intellectual property rights in what they upload, and that TPT gets a license to display and deliver it through the site, not ownership [1].

The checklist

1. 1

   Your original files

   You already have these: the PDFs, slides, and editable sources you uploaded. Make sure they exist in two places, your computer and one cloud folder, and that the folder names match your store. A backup that only lives on one laptop is not a backup.

2. 2

   Listing text: titles and descriptions

   This is the part most sellers do not have anywhere else. Every product page on your store is public, so you do not need to be signed in or hand anyone your password. Open each product page and either save it (print to PDF works in any browser) or paste the title, description, and price into a spreadsheet with one row per product. The spreadsheet is the version you will thank yourself for: it drops straight into any other tool later.

3. 3

   Thumbnails and preview images

   Also public on each product page. Save them next to the product’s files, named the same way. If you made them in Canva or PowerPoint, the editable originals matter more than the exported images, so check those are in the backup too.

4. 4

   Prices, grades, subjects, and resource types

   Visible on the product page and on your store listing. Put them in the same spreadsheet as the descriptions. You set these once per product and will not want to redo three hundred of them from memory.

5. 5

   Ratings and reviews

   Public, and the only social proof your store has earned. Screenshots are fine. For your best sellers, copy the review text into the spreadsheet so it can be quoted later.

6. 6

   Sales and earnings records

   Whatever your seller dashboard shows for sales and payouts, save it: download it if the page offers a download, print each month to PDF if it does not. You will want this for taxes regardless of what happens to the store.

7. 7

   Store settings

   Your store name, bio, banner, profile image, and the links you have added. One screenshot of each settings page and copies of the images.

A store of a few dozen products is an hour. Three hundred products is an afternoon with a podcast on. If you use an AI tool to speed up the copying, point it at your public product pages, never at your login.

What you cannot download

Your buyers. The people who bought from you are TPT’s customers, and your dashboard does not give you a way to take their email addresses with you. Followers of your store are the same: the relationship runs through TPT, not through you. That is the one part of the business a backup cannot save, and it is the part that decides whether a future platform change is an inconvenience or a restart.

The fix is not complicated, and it is explicitly allowed on every tier, including Exclusive: a free resource of your own as a lead magnet and an email list you build from it [2]. Put the freebie inside your paid products too, as a page that points to your list, so every sale from now on can turn into someone you can reach directly.

Three rules while you do it

• Never give a tool your TPT password. TPT’s terms make you responsible for keeping it confidential [1], and nothing on this checklist needs it. Any AI or browser tool that asks to “log in for you” is asking for more than the job requires.
• Copying is not selling. Making a backup changes nothing about your tier. Putting the same resources up for sale on another site does: an Exclusive seller agrees to sell digital teaching resources only through TPT, while Basic has no such condition [2], [3]. If you are weighing that, the numbers are in our plain-English guide to the Exclusive tier.
• Keep the spreadsheet current. Add a row every time you publish a product. The afternoon you spend today is wasted if the copy is a year stale when you need it.

What to do with the copy

Three options, from least to most work. Only the first two are open to an Exclusive seller.

1. 1Keep it as a backup and change nothing. Completely reasonable. You now have your store on your own disk, and you can decide the rest later.
2. 2Put a page of your own in front of the store. Your resources as cards with Buy buttons that send the purchase to TPT, your freebie and subscribe form, your links, at an address you control. TPT’s own FAQ describes exactly this as allowed for Exclusive sellers [2]. The spreadsheet from the checklist is the input: titles, descriptions, prices, thumbnails, and the TPT link for each.
3. 3Open a store with its own checkout. Payhip, Shopify, Etsy, and the like. This is the only option that means selling off TPT, so it is Basic-tier only, and it comes with fees, taxes, and support of its own. Worth doing when the math says so, not as a reflex. We are writing up what the tools cost next.

Homeroom is a free page built for option two: resource cards that link to your TPT store, a subscribe form with a freebie behind it, and a full export of your page and your list whenever you want them. Build one in a minute at homeroom.page/try, and the Promise says what we will never do with it.