Copyright © 2026 Everyday Backups · everydaybackups.com · Secure cloud backup for small business & personal files
A dock or a seawall exists legally only because of the paper trail that authorized it: a federal permit, a state agency response, a local building department sign-off, an engineer's sealed drawings, an as-built survey, assembled over months and sometimes years. Lose that file and you have not lost a job history, you have taken away the one thing that lets an owner prove the structure in the water was ever permitted at all, at the exact moment a sale, an insurance inspection, or a post-storm rebuild puts the question to them. Years later, the contractor who built it is often the only party who still has the complete file.
Two different things, and you pick either one. The 2-minute self-check is a short set of questions you answer yourself. The free 15-minute Backup Risk Check is a review our team runs with you, by phone or screen share, going through where your permit files, drawings, surveys and photos actually live and what would happen to them if the office computer stopped working tomorrow.
Everyday Backups provides managed, encrypted cloud backup for Windows computers, with monitoring, restore support, and monthly backup health reporting. Paid plans from $5.99/mo.
A marine contractor's most valuable data is not a single company database. It is dozens or hundreds of individual property files, each one a multi-agency paper trail that starts before a shovel or a pile driver ever touches the water and, in practice, never really closes. A property owner, a title company, an insurance adjuster, or a post-storm rebuild permit reviewer can come back asking for a specific document from a job finished ten or fifteen years earlier. The categories below are what a working marine contractor should be able to hand over, for a single waterfront address, on short notice.
A gap in any one of these categories tends to surface at the worst possible moment: a closing attorney asks for the issued permit and drawings and nobody can locate them, an insurance adjuster wants the as-built survey compared against the permitted footprint and the file is gone, or a homeowner rebuilding after a storm needs the original engineering drawings to match the new work to what was approved, and the firm that built it fifteen years ago has no record left to hand over.
CISA promotes the 3-2-1 rule as a simple standard for small-business backup, and it maps directly onto a marine contractor's two very different kinds of files: this month's active job files, and the growing archive of every property the firm has ever built or serviced.
Your working copy is whatever sits on the office PC, a field laptop, or a phone today: this month's active jobs plus the accumulated archive of properties built or serviced in prior years. A second copy on a local external drive or a second machine protects against one device failing. A third copy, off-site in encrypted cloud storage, protects the archive, which cannot be recreated by re-diving a structure or re-requesting agency correspondence years later, from a single event at the office taking out both of the first two copies at once.
A marine contractor's archive grows every year and rarely gets deleted, so relying on two drives of the same type inside 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 to a current job and a separate cloud destination for the accumulating property archive, so one kind of hardware failure cannot take out both at once.
Off-site matters more for a marine contractor's property archive than for almost any other file category the firm holds, because a signed and sealed engineering drawing or a decade-old agency response cannot be reissued if the local copy is destroyed. Cloud backup satisfies the off-site requirement when the data goes to a separate data center rather than an external drive in the same office, and it is the copy that survives a fire, flood, or theft affecting the office where the working files and the archive were stored together.
CISA recommends keeping at least one backup copy that is not continuously connected to the network. For a marine contractor this matters most for the property archive, since years of closed-job folders sitting on a mapped network drive are exposed to the same ransomware sweep as this week's active files. A cloud-based backup that is not directly mounted on your local network is far less likely to be reached and encrypted alongside a property's original permit chain.
The items below are specific to how a marine contractor's files are actually scattered across an office, a truck, a boat, and a phone. They are the starting point before anything else in this framework matters, not a complete checklist on their own.
For a broader self-assessment of your current backup posture, see the small-business backup checklist and the plain explanation of the 3-2-1 backup rule.
Most backup advice is written for files that change constantly: this week's job, this month's payroll. A marine contractor has a second, quieter problem. The permit file you assemble this year may not be opened again until a sale, an insurance inspection, or a rebuild permit pulls it back out ten or fifteen years from now, and by then the person asking usually has nothing but a street address or a parcel number. Being able to hand that file over on the spot is a different exercise than backing up this week's work, and it deserves its own plan.
Two systems generate most of a marine contractor's records: whatever permitting portal your projects run through, and QuickBooks or a similar accounting platform. Knowing exactly what each one's backup covers, and where the gap is, matters more here than at most small businesses because the permit record may need to outlive the software, and sometimes the agency's own retention window.
Your permitting portal holds what you submitted to that specific agency for that specific application, and often its own copy of the agency's determination letter. It does not hold your engineer's original sealed drawings as sent to you, your as-built survey, your dive footage, or your correspondence with the other agencies in the chain if the project touched more than one. And a portal login is not a backup of anything: it is the agency's record of the transaction, not your independent, restorable copy of your project file.
Cloud sync is a related but separate trap. A synced folder that mirrors a laptop or an office PC looks protected, but sync only mirrors what is currently there; delete a file or have it encrypted by ransomware and the synced copy follows along. See cloud sync vs. backup for what each actually protects against.
A marine contractor's QuickBooks company file tends to carry payroll, job costing, and years of revenue history in a single file that grows steadily and rarely gets deleted. Intuit's own documentation recommends a backup copy stored in a separate location from the original, and specifically notes that backing up to the same machine only is not adequate protection.
A common mistake at small marine contracting firms is the 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 flag small businesses as ransomware targets precisely because they tend to have thinner IT defenses than larger companies while still holding records worth extorting over. A marine contractor fits that pattern with one added twist: the records at risk are not only this quarter's jobs but an archive of permit chains nobody can afford to lose. One plain fact worth stating without drama: coastal firms operate in a region where storms are a normal part of the calendar, and a backup that lives off-site in the cloud is not exposed to the same event that might affect the office itself.
For a marine contractor specifically, the sharpest risk is the archive. A ransomware event that reaches a network share holding years of closed-job folders can encrypt every property's permit, survey, and engineering drawings in one pass, the same way it would encrypt this week's paperwork. Unlike an active job, which can sometimes be reconstructed by contacting the agencies involved, a completed property's assembled file, once encrypted or lost, usually has no single second source anywhere outside the contractor's own records.
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. A cloud backup that is not sitting on your local network as a mounted drive is much less likely to be touched by whatever just encrypted the office PC. For a fuller walkthrough, see ransomware restore readiness, and for a broader look at storm-season preparedness for small business records generally, see hurricane business file backup.
Backup is a recovery control, not a security or privacy control, and it is worth saying plainly: encrypting and backing up a permit file protects your ability to get that file back if it is lost, corrupted, or ransomed, but it does not make the record secure, it does not make it private, and it does not stop anyone from misusing what is inside it. A tested backup shortens a bad week; it does not replace a firm's separate security and privacy practices, and it is not offered here as a substitute for them.
Three other pages on this site cover businesses that sit near marine construction but are not the same thing, and it is worth being explicit about the boundary so you land on the right one.
If your firm's work spans more than one of these descriptions, for example a marine contractor that also operates a small marina, more than one page may be relevant, but the permit-chain record set described above is what this page is built around.
Yes. A permitting portal, whether it belongs to a federal agency, a state environmental agency, a water management district, or a local building department, stores what you submitted to that specific agency for that specific application. It does not store your full property file: the engineering drawings your engineer sent you directly, the dive inspection photos and video, the as-built survey you had prepared, the correspondence with the other two agencies in the chain, or your own copies of anything. If your office PC fails or is encrypted by ransomware and the portal is the only place any of that exists, most of the file for that property is gone, because the portal was never meant to be your archive.
Usually not automatically, and it is worth checking rather than assuming. Dive and inspection footage is typically shot on a phone, a GoPro, or a diver's own camera and then copied to whichever computer happens to be handy, sometimes a laptop that lives in a truck rather than the main office machine. Unless that specific folder or that specific device has been added to your backup configuration, the footage is not protected even if your permit files and QuickBooks are. Underwater footage of a structure before it was covered by fill or before storm damage occurred cannot be reshot after the fact.
No. Sync keeps a folder looking identical across every device connected to it, which means a deletion, an overwrite, or a ransomware encryption event on one device shows up in the synced copy just as fast, often within seconds. Backup keeps point-in-time versions you can reach back to from before the damage happened. For a permit file assembled over months across three agencies, with no practical way to reassemble it from scratch, that version history is what actually protects you. See our comparison of cloud sync vs. backup for the full explanation.
Two different clocks apply here. Day-to-day version history exists to undo a recent mistake or a recent ransomware event, so it needs to reach back far enough that you can still return to a copy from before the problem started. Separately, many marine contractors choose to keep a complete permit and as-built file for as long as the structure could plausibly still be standing in the water, which in practice often means indefinitely, since a sale, a refinance, an insurance inspection, or a rebuild permit can call for that file decades after the work was completed. How long any particular record needs to be retained is a business decision, and in some cases a legal one, for your own advisors; this page addresses only whether the records you decide to keep can actually be recovered.
Treat it as something to look at that day, not at the next slow week. Common causes each point to a different fix: a laptop was left in a truck overnight and never connected to power or a network during the scheduled backup window, a file was open in another program, a drive filled up, or a login or network issue blocked the upload. A failure that sits unresolved for weeks means there is no real coverage during that stretch, and if a machine is lost, stolen from a job site, or hit by ransomware in that window, there is nothing to restore from. Alerting on failure, rather than discovering it later, is the baseline fix.
No. Everyday Backups is a backup and recovery service, not a compliance product, and it makes no claim of satisfying any recordkeeping, permit-condition, or retention requirement of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, any state environmental agency, any water management district, any submerged lands or public trust authority, or any local building department. Whether your permit conditions require you to retain specific records, for how long, and in what form, is a legal and regulatory question for your own attorney or the issuing agency. This page and this service address only the technical question of whether your own copies of those records can be recovered if a machine fails, a file is deleted, or ransomware strikes.
No. Permitting strategy, wetlands and environmental determinations, coastal setback and riparian rights questions, property boundary questions, and engineering or structural design for seawalls, docks, or lifts are matters for your permitting agency, your attorney, your surveyor, and your professional engineer. Everyday Backups gives no advice on any of it. It only helps you keep a recoverable copy of whatever permit, survey, and engineering documents you already have and choose to keep on file.
This page is about a specific record type: a multi-agency waterfront permit chain and its matching as-built file, tied to a submerged or waterfront parcel and often needed years after the work is done. Backup for contractors and construction firms covers general building project files, which is a different record shape without the multi-agency permit chain or the years-later ownership question. Backup for marinas and boat dealers covers businesses that operate a marina or sell boats, not firms that build the docks, lifts, and seawalls themselves. Backup for land surveyors covers the firm that produces the survey, whereas this page covers the contractor holding the permit chain that the survey supports. Most marine construction firms should read this page first and only the others if those descriptions also fit part of their business.
It installs on Windows machines, whether that is the office PC, a laptop that travels in a truck, or a bookkeeper's home computer, watches for failed or overdue backup jobs and alerts when one happens, keeps version history so a file can be pulled from an earlier point in time, 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 is meant to be set up once and then run quietly in the background. Each Windows machine that touches a property's permit file needs its own coverage.
Everyday Backups is a backup and recovery service, not legal, regulatory, permitting, environmental, engineering, surveying, or compliance advice. It does not by itself satisfy, and makes no claim of satisfying, any recordkeeping, permit-condition, or retention requirement of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, any state environmental agency, any water management district, any submerged lands or public trust authority, or any local building department. It provides no permitting, environmental, wetlands, coastal, riparian rights, property boundary, engineering, or structural advice, and it makes no claim regarding commercial diving safety, OSHA compliance, marine safety compliance, or contractor licensing, bonding, or insurance status. A backup is a data recovery tool, not a data security or privacy product, and backing up a record does not make that record secure, private, or compliant with any agency requirement. No compatibility with any specific permitting portal, estimating software, project management software, or accounting software is guaranteed or implied; verify backup scope and file coverage with your own IT review. References to CISA, FTC, Microsoft, and Intuit documentation are for informational context only and do not constitute endorsement by those organizations. Consult qualified legal, permitting, engineering, and surveying professionals for requirements specific to your business and your projects.
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Copyright © 2026 Everyday Backups · everydaybackups.com · Secure cloud backup for small business & personal files