They could store it on aws glacier or something and it would cost them cents per month. They probably do something like that anyway when you cancel as someone said they could restore their shop after having cancelled two years before that. $9 is quite a lot for something that does nothing. I often have side projects ‘I need to come back to some day’ and then 3 years later I think ah… not good if that was 3x12x9. Export is great if you are guaranteed to be able to just import and it will work as before. I don’t see that much; usually exports from years back give a nice ‘your export was done with an older version, sorry’. How does that work with shopify export/import?
None of this is really relevant - Shopify is a paid service, has always been a paid service, and clearly markets itself as a paid service. Just because it's cheap for them to store information doesn't mean you should expect them to do it for you. They only want to deal with paying customers, so when you elect to stop being a paying customer, they get rid of your information. That is a perfectly reasonable business practice - not "hostile" as the comment I was responding to called it.
It is relevant, but as it happens these days, you read only the first line of my comment. I was agreeing with you (I can read longer comments) and was thinking of ways how to resolve it if you want to pay nothing or much less. I never said they have to store anything for free (no one has to) but you can imagine some kind of glacier storage for $9/year or something; it seems they already do that but don't tell you about it anyway considering comments from others.
