Copyright © 2026 Everyday Backups · everydaybackups.com · Secure cloud backup for small business & personal files
Independently owned hardware stores, lumber yards and building supply dealers across the rural South usually run on an owner or manager who still works the counter, a few counter staff, a yard crew and a delivery driver, and a bookkeeper who handles billing, monthly statements and payroll on one or two office PCs. A counter PC or two runs the point of sale system. Local builders, remodelers and farmers buy on charge accounts, and material goes out the gate on the strength of a name and a signature. The file that says who owes what is the store's working capital, and at many stores it lives on one office PC. If that PC is gone, the store may not know who owes what for material already sitting on a job site.
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, counter PCs 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 actually hold your charge account, statement and delivery records today, and what would happen at month end if the office PC 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 charge account records, statements, delivery tickets, paint formulas, price files and financial files that a hardware store or lumber yard keeps in and around its point of sale and inventory software. It is not a point of sale, inventory or accounts-receivable product, and this page makes no claim to integrate with any of them. This page also gives no lien-law, credit, collections or sales-tax advice, no advice about any recordkeeping or retention obligation, and no legal, tax, or regulatory advice of any kind. What follows is about the files your office, your counter and your yard create and save, not about the systems someone else runs for you.
A lumber yard or hardware store that sells to builders is also a lender, whether anyone calls it that or not. A framing package goes out on Monday, the invoice goes on the contractor's account, and the statement goes out at the end of the month. In between, the material is on a job site and the money is in the receivables file.
Anyone who has watched a yard manager try to work out who owes what for a month of framing packages after the counter PC died knows how that week goes. The delivery tickets are in a drawer, some of them signed and some not. The statements that went out last month are on the dead machine. Three builders say they paid, two say they were never billed, and the store is reconstructing its own receivables from memory and from the customers' memory too. That is slow, it is awkward with people the store has served for decades, and it puts real strain on cash.
That is the situation this page is written around. The fix is continuity rather than anything exotic: the office and counter records and the books get backed up automatically, off-site, with version history, and a restore is actually tested. A smaller version of the same problem is the custom paint formula. Many stores keep the formula for a customer's color so they can touch up a room years later, and if your store is one of them, that formula may exist only in your own records.
A small store holds more files than its staffing would suggest, and the office PC and the counter PC are often the only places some of them exist. The record set below is what many stores want to be able to put a hand on, on short notice, for a statement question, a delivery dispute or a customer who walks in years later asking for the same color.
The charge account file and the signed delivery tickets deserve special mention. A price file can be requested again from a vendor, and a product can be reordered, but the record of what went out to whom, and who signed for it, belongs to your store alone. That makes it worth protecting with the same care as the cash drawer, and arguably more.
CISA promotes the 3-2-1 rule as a simple standard for small-business backup, and it maps directly onto how a store holds its files: the charge accounts and statements that keep accumulating and the tickets that arrive from the yard every day.
Your working copy is whatever sits on the office PC or the counter PC 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 receivables and delivery records from a single event at the store 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.
Off-site matters most for the files that cannot be recreated, like the record of what went out on a charge account last month. 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 store or the yard.
CISA recommends keeping at least one backup copy that is not continuously connected to the network. For a store this matters because years of statements on a mapped drive are exposed to the same ransomware sweep as this week's tickets. A backup copy kept off-site, and not mounted as a drive on your local network, is kept apart from the files it protects.
The calendar of a store with charge accounts has a hard edge in it. At the end of the month the statements have to go out, and what customers pay depends on what the statements say. A store that loses its receivables file in the middle of the month is not only missing history. It is missing the next statement run.
This is where version history earns its keep. A file that was correct last week and damaged today can be pulled back from an earlier point, which is different from a copy that changed right along with the damage. A bookkeeper who can restore last month's statement files to a new machine can start from a known position. A bookkeeper who cannot has to start from the paper and the memory of a counter full of people.
A backup keeps a copy of the records your store already produces. It does not tell you how to extend credit, how to collect on an account, what to do about an unpaid balance, or how to handle sales tax on a sale, and it gives no advice on any of that. Those are matters for your own attorney, your own accountant and your own advisors.
The items below are specific to how a store's files are scattered across an office PC, a counter PC or two, a delivery driver's phone, and whatever point of sale, inventory or accounts-receivable system the store 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.
Two kinds of software sit behind most of a store's day, the point of sale, inventory and accounts-receivable tools that ring up sales and track stock, and the accounting software that handles payroll and the books. Knowing what each one covers, and where the gap is, matters because the statements, tickets and formulas 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 point of sale, inventory or accounts-receivable system. What is the store's to protect is everything around it: the exports and reports you save locally, the files that sit alongside it, the scans and photos, and every file on the office and counter computers.
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 store'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 or card 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 a store the loss can be specific, not just a slow week: it can be the receivables file, the statements and the only copy of the delivery records, kept on whichever computer the store 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.
Across the rural South, a storm that takes out power or floods a low-lying yard office hits the same building that holds the office PC. A copy that sits off-site does not depend on the building. For the wider picture of business files and severe weather, see hurricane business file backup.
Microsoft publishes its own restore documentation for OneDrive, which is worth reading if your store 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 statements, the tickets and the books protects your store'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 lien-law, credit, collections or sales-tax 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 store. A tested backup shortens a bad week, it does not replace your store's own practices or its own diligence.
A few other pages on this site cover businesses that sit near a hardware store or lumber yard but are not the same thing, and it is worth being explicit about the boundary so you land on the right one.
If your store spans more than one of these descriptions, more than one page may apply, but the charge accounts, delivery tickets, paint formulas and office books described above are what this page is built around.
Our farm supply page is written around feed, seed and farm credit. This page is about the hardware store or lumber yard that sells material to builders and remodelers on charge accounts, with monthly statements, job and lot accounts, delivery tickets and custom paint formulas. A store that serves both farmers and builders may find both pages useful.
Our contractor page is written for the builder, with bids, plans and job files. This page is written for the supplier the builder buys from, whose most important record is the receivables file that shows who owes what for material already delivered. The two pages describe different businesses and different record sets.
Our flooring page is about a showroom and the installs that follow a sale. This page is about the counter and the yard, with contractor pricing, charge accounts, delivery tickets and equipment rental records. A store that sells both may find the two pages useful together.
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 statements 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 point of sale, inventory or accounts-receivable 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 scans and photos on your devices. Verify your own backup scope with your own review.
No. Everyday Backups gives no lien-law, credit, collections or sales-tax advice, and no legal, tax or regulatory advice of any kind. How a store extends credit, how it collects on an unpaid account, and how sales tax applies to a sale are matters for your own attorney, your own accountant and your own advisors. Everyday Backups only helps keep a recoverable copy of the files your store 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 or card records are secure, private or PCI compliant. It also makes no claim about any recordkeeping or retention obligation or whether one applies to your store. 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 stores keep the charge accounts, monthly statements and books on one office PC, with no second copy anywhere else. If that PC fails, is stolen, or is hit by ransomware, the store may not know who owes what for material already sitting on a job site, and the next statement run is in doubt. A copy that is automatic, off-site, and has version history means those files still exist and can be pulled back on a new machine.
It installs on the Windows office PC, a counter PC, 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 a delivery driver's phone or a tablet 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 store 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 a point of sale, inventory or accounts-receivable product, and no compatibility or integration with any point of sale, inventory, accounts-receivable or paint-matching software is guaranteed or implied, verify backup scope and file coverage with your own review. This page gives no lien-law, credit, collections or sales-tax 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 store, that remains your store's own responsibility, guided by your own advisors. It makes no claim that customer payment or card 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 tax advisors for requirements specific to your store.
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