Copyright © 2026 Everyday Backups · everydaybackups.com · Secure cloud backup for small business & personal files
Independent residential and commercial electricians, standby generator installers and low-voltage shops across the Gulf Coast and the rural South usually run on an owner or master electrician who still bids and runs jobs, a few journeymen and apprentices, and one office PC where a spouse or office manager handles estimating support, billing and payroll. Phones and tablets on the job collect the photos. The photos taken of the wiring before the drywall goes up are often the only record of what is inside the wall, and they usually live on one phone. If that phone is lost, broken or replaced, that record is gone, and it cannot be recreated without opening the wall again.
Two different things, and you pick either one. The 2-minute self-check is a short set of questions you answer yourself, covering how your office records, job phone photos and books are currently protected. The free 15-minute Backup Risk Check is a review our team runs with you, by phone or screen share, going through which computers and phones actually hold your shop's files today, and what would happen to your rough-in photos if the phone that took them were gone tomorrow.
Everyday Backups provides automatic, encrypted, off-site backup for Windows computers, with version history and restore support. It runs on Windows, iPhone, iPad, and Android, and paid plans start from $5.99/mo.
Everyday Backups backs up files on Windows computers, plus phones and tablets: the bids, drawings, photos, maintenance records and financial files that an electrical shop keeps outside its estimating and invoicing software. It is not an estimating, takeoff or invoicing product, and this page makes no claim to integrate with any estimating, takeoff, invoicing or field-service system. This page also gives no electrical code, licensing, permitting, lien-law, apprenticeship-hour or warranty advice, and no legal, tax, or regulatory advice of any kind. What follows is about the files your office and your crews create and save, not about the systems someone else runs for you.
Most trades leave something visible behind. Electrical work is different, because the part that matters most is hidden. Once the drywall is up, nobody can see where the runs go, where the boxes and splices sit, or what was roughed in behind a given wall. The pictures taken before the wall was closed are, at many small shops, the only record of it.
Anyone who has watched a master electrician realize that the only rough-in photos of a finished house were on the phone that just went into the lake knows how that moment goes. The house is done, the customer is happy, and then a year later someone wants to add a circuit, hang a heavy fixture, or trace a problem, and the question is what is behind that wall. The answer was on a phone that no longer exists. Getting it back means opening the wall, which is the one thing a photo was supposed to prevent.
That is the situation this page is written around. The fix is continuity rather than anything exotic: the office record set, the job phones' photos, and the books get backed up automatically, off-site, with version history, and a restore is actually tested.
A small shop holds more files than its staffing would suggest, and the office PC and the job phones are often the only places some of them exist. The record set below is what many electrical shops want to be able to put a hand on, on short notice, for a callback, an add-on job or a question from a customer years later.
The rough-in photos deserve special mention. A bid can be rebuilt from a plan, and an invoice can be reprinted from the books, but a photograph of the inside of a wall that has since been closed cannot be taken again. That makes it worth protecting with the same care as the invoice, and arguably more.
CISA promotes the 3-2-1 rule as a simple standard for small-business backup, and it maps directly onto how an electrical shop holds its files: the bids and drawings that keep accumulating and the photos that arrive from the job phones every day.
Your working copy is whatever sits on the office PC or the job phone today. A second copy on a separate drive or a second machine protects against one device failing. A third copy, off-site in encrypted cloud storage, protects the photos and as-built records that cannot be recreated from a single event at the shop or in the field taking out the first two copies together.
Two external drives of the same type in the same office just means both copies age and can fail together. CISA guidance calls for two genuinely different storage types, for example a local drive for quick access and a separate cloud destination for the accumulating history and photos.
Off-site matters most for the files that cannot be recreated, like a photo of a wall that has since been closed. Cloud backup satisfies the off-site requirement when the data goes to a separate data center rather than a drive kept in the same office, and it is the copy that survives a fire, theft, or flood at the shop, or a storm that takes out a truck.
CISA recommends keeping at least one backup copy that is not continuously connected to the network. For a shop this matters because the drawings and years of photos on a mapped drive are exposed to the same ransomware sweep as this week's invoices. A backup copy kept off-site, and not mounted as a drive on your local network, is kept apart from the files it protects.
Across the Gulf Coast and the rural South, storm season drives standby generator installs and service calls. For a shop that does that work, the weeks around a hurricane or a long outage are the busiest and the least forgiving. The phones are in constant use, the office is fielding calls, and the records that tell you which customer has which generator, and what was done to it, are suddenly the most important files in the building.
Those records are also the ones most exposed to the same storm. An office that loses power, floods, or has a computer damaged is looking at the loss of its generator install notes, its maintenance logs and its service agreement roster at exactly the moment customers are calling. A copy that sits off-site, with version history, is the one that does not depend on the building. For the wider picture of business files and severe weather, see hurricane business file backup.
As with everything on this page, a backup keeps a copy of the records your shop already produces. It does not tell you how to size, install or maintain a generator, and it gives no advice on any of that.
The items below are specific to how an electrical shop's files are scattered across an office PC, job phones and tablets, and whatever estimating or invoicing system the shop uses. They are a starting point, not a complete checklist on their own.
For a broader self-assessment of your current backup posture, see the small-business backup checklist.
It helps to picture the actual afternoon. A homeowner wants to add a circuit, or a new owner is trying to understand what was done to the house, and asks where the wiring runs behind a finished wall. The crew is good and the work was done well. What is sometimes gone, at many small shops, is the photo that answers the question, because the phone that took it was replaced, and nobody had a second copy.
It is worth being precise about what a working backup does and does not do here. A recoverable copy of the photos, drawings and records means those files still exist and can be pulled back up on a new device. It does not decide whether a permit was required, whether work met any requirement, or what a customer is owed. Those remain your shop's own judgment, guided by your own advisors.
Two kinds of software sit behind most of an electrical shop's day, the estimating, takeoff and invoicing tools that price the work and bill the jobs, and the accounting software that handles payroll and the books. Knowing what each one covers, and where the gap is, matters because the photos, drawings and records often live partly outside both.
Whatever lives inside a vendor's cloud system is theirs to run. Everyday Backups makes no claim to integrate with any estimating, takeoff, invoicing or field-service system. What is the shop's to protect is everything around it: the exports and reports you save locally, the files that sit alongside it, the photos on the phones, and every file on the office computer.
Being able to log in to a hosted system is access to a working tool, which is a different thing from a copy you control, so it is worth asking whoever runs it what they do and do not hold for you.
A shop's accounting file carries payroll, invoices and the books in a single file that grows steadily and rarely gets deleted. Intuit's own documentation recommends a backup copy stored in a location separate from the original, and specifically notes that backing up to the same machine only is not adequate protection. Nothing on this page says that customer payment records are secure, private or PCI compliant.
A common mistake at small offices is a built-in backup feature writing to a different folder on the same drive as the original, which does not protect against a drive failure. For a closer look at QuickBooks-specific backup steps, see QuickBooks backup for small businesses.
CISA and the FTC both publish guidance noting that small businesses are targets of ransomware. For an electrical shop the loss can be specific, not just a slow week: it can be the drawings, the bids, and the only copy of the rough-in photos, kept on whichever computer or phone the shop happened to use. CISA's #StopRansomware guidance points to offline and encrypted backup copies as the main technical way to recover once ransomware has already encrypted production files. A backup drive that stays mapped to the network, or a sync folder that mirrors changes as they happen, can be swept up in the same attack as everything else. For a fuller walkthrough, see ransomware restore readiness.
Microsoft publishes its own restore documentation for OneDrive, which is worth reading if your shop uses it, because it shows how far back a restore can reach in that product and what it does not cover. It is a good reminder that restoring is a skill, and that it is easier to learn on a quiet day.
Backup is a recovery tool, not a security, privacy, or compliance control, and it is worth saying plainly. Backing up the photos, the drawings and the books protects your shop's ability to get them back if they are lost, corrupted, or ransomed, but it does not make them secure, it does not make them private, and it does not make them compliant with any rule. It gives no electrical code, licensing, permitting, lien-law, apprenticeship-hour or warranty advice, and no legal, tax, or regulatory advice of any kind. It makes no claim about any recordkeeping or retention obligation, and does not say whether any requirement applies to your shop. A tested backup shortens a bad week, it does not replace your shop's own practices or its own diligence.
A few other pages on this site cover businesses that sit near an electrical shop but are not the same thing, and it is worth being explicit about the boundary so you land on the right one.
If your shop spans more than one of these descriptions, more than one page may apply, but the rough-in photos, drawings, generator records and office books described above are what this page is built around.
Our contractor and construction page uses the general contractor and builder framing, with bids, plans, subcontractors and job files for a firm that builds whole projects. This page is about an electrical shop, where the record that matters most is often what was inside a wall before the drywall went up. The two pages describe different businesses and different record sets, and a shop that does both kinds of work may find both useful.
Our solar installer page is specific to photovoltaic installation companies and the paper trail around their systems. This page is the broader electrical record set: bids and takeoffs, panel schedules and one-line drawings, rough-in photos, permit and inspection copies, standby generator records, and the office books. A shop that installs both may find the two pages useful together.
Our field-service page is general, written for dispatch-driven service trades of any kind. This page is the electrical record set, with its center of gravity on rough-in photos taken before walls are closed. If your shop runs dispatch software, that page covers the general pattern and this one covers what is specific to electrical work.
Our plumbing page is built around water heaters, drains, sewer lines and sewer camera footage. This page is built around the electrical shop: wiring photos, panel schedules, as-built markups and generator maintenance records. The trades share a pattern, which is that the evidence lives on a phone, but the records themselves are different.
No. Sync keeps a folder looking the same across every device connected to it, so a deletion, an overwrite, or a ransomware encryption event on one device shows up in the synced copy just as fast. Backup keeps earlier versions you can reach back to from before the damage happened. A folder of rough-in photos that was intact yesterday and damaged today cannot be recovered from a synced copy that changed right along with it. See our comparison of cloud sync vs. backup for the full explanation.
Everyday Backups makes no claim to integrate with any estimating, takeoff, invoicing or field-service software. Whatever lives inside a vendor's cloud system is run by whoever provides and hosts it, and that part is theirs to protect. Everyday Backups backs up files on Windows computers, phones and tablets, which means the exports and reports you save locally, the spreadsheets and documents around the system, and the photos on the job phones. Verify your own backup scope with your own review.
No. Everyday Backups gives no electrical code, licensing, permitting, lien-law, apprenticeship-hour or warranty advice, and no legal, tax or regulatory advice of any kind. Whether a permit was required, how a lien-related notice must be handled, what an apprenticeship program expects, and how a warranty applies are matters for your own licensing contacts, your own attorney and your own advisors. Everyday Backups only helps keep a recoverable copy of the files your shop already produces.
No. Everyday Backups makes no claim that a backed up file is secure, private or compliant with any rule, and no claim that customer payment records are secure, private or PCI compliant. It also makes no claim about any recordkeeping or retention obligation or whether one applies to your shop. Backup is a recovery tool, not a security, privacy or compliance control. It helps you get a copy of your own files back if a computer fails, is stolen, or is hit by ransomware.
Many small electrical shops keep the only photos of what is inside a finished wall on one phone, and the bids, panel schedules and books on one office PC, with no second copy anywhere else. If the phone is lost, broken or replaced, or the PC fails, is stolen, or is hit by ransomware, those photos cannot be recreated without opening the wall again. A copy that is automatic, off-site, and has version history means those files still exist and can be pulled back on a new device.
It installs on the Windows office PC, the estimator's machine, or the computer that handles the books and payroll, backs up automatically, keeps version history so a file can be pulled from an earlier point, encrypts data in transit and at rest, and sends the copy to off-site cloud storage rather than local media that could be lost in the same event as the originals. It also runs on iPhone, iPad and Android, so job phones and tablets can be covered, and plans start from $5.99/mo. It is meant to be set up once and then run quietly in the background. Each Windows machine that holds shop files needs its own coverage. If a backup job fails, treat it as something to look at that week, not months later.
Everyday Backups is file backup only, for Windows computers, phones, and tablets, it is not an estimating, takeoff or invoicing product, and no compatibility or integration with any estimating, takeoff, invoicing, field-service or camera software is guaranteed or implied, verify backup scope and file coverage with your own review. This page gives no electrical code, licensing, permitting, lien-law, apprenticeship-hour or warranty advice, and no legal, tax, or regulatory advice of any kind. It makes no claim about any recordkeeping or retention obligation, and does not say whether any such requirement applies to your shop, that remains your shop's own responsibility, guided by your own advisors. It makes no claim that customer payment records or any other file are secure, private, or PCI compliant. A backup is a data recovery tool, not a data security, privacy, or compliance product, and backing up a file does not make that file secure, private, or compliant with any rule. References to CISA, FTC, Microsoft, and Intuit documentation are for informational context only and do not constitute endorsement by those organizations. Consult qualified legal, financial, and electrical advisors for requirements specific to your shop.
Everyday Backups runs on Windows, iPhone, iPad, and Android. Set it once; it backs up automatically, encrypted, off-site. Paid plans from $5.99/mo.
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Copyright © 2026 Everyday Backups · everydaybackups.com · Secure cloud backup for small business & personal files