We do not sell backup. This page is what we would tell you if you rang and asked, which happens often enough that it is easier to write it down.

Two things are already handled if you are a client, and it is worth being clear which:

  • Your mailbox is backed up by us, every night, on both email options. That is a house rule, not an add-on. See Business Email.
  • Your website is backed up by us, as part of the care plan.

What is left is the computer in the office or the ute (the one with the quotes, the accounts file, the folder of old contracts and the template you built once and could not recreate), your phone, and whatever you keep in cloud storage. Here is the honest answer for each.

Syncing is not backing up

Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox and iCloud keep the same copy of your files on every device. That is syncing, and it is genuinely useful: a dead laptop does not take your files with it.

It is not a backup. When a file is deleted, overwritten or scrambled by ransomware on one device, the sync service copies that change everywhere, because that is its job. Most of them keep deleted files in a bin for a while, often around 30 days, and some keep earlier versions of a file. After that, the file is gone from every device at once.

A backup is a separate copy, kept somewhere else, going back months, that a mistake on your computer cannot reach. That is what the rest of this page is about.

The office computer: use Backblaze

Backblaze Business Backup, about US$99 a year per computer. Unlimited storage, it runs in the background, and it is the tool most people in this industry use themselves. You buy it direct. We take no commission and we are not a reseller. If a better answer appears, we will change this page.

Install it on every computer that has business data on it. Not the one you think matters most, every one. It is about US$99 a year each, roughly A$150, and the one you forgot is always the one that dies.

The setting almost everyone misses

Out of the box, Backblaze keeps thirty days of file versions. Turn on One-Year Version History. It is free on Business accounts, and it is a checkbox in your account settings.

Thirty days is fine for “I deleted the wrong file yesterday”. It is useless for the two situations that actually cost money: ransomware that sat quietly for six weeks before it triggered, and the spreadsheet that was corrupted in March and nobody opened until June. A year of history covers both. It takes about a minute to turn on, and it changes what the product is for.

The rule that catches people out

If a computer stops backing up for six months, Backblaze deletes its backup. That is in the terms and it is not a mistake. The usual case is a laptop that got replaced, or one that lived in a cupboard for a season: the backup you were counting on quietly expires while nobody is watching.

If a machine is going to be off for a long stretch, either plug it in and let it run once a month, or get the data off it and stop paying for the licence on purpose rather than by accident.

Your phone: synced, not backed up

Backblaze backs up computers, not phones. Your phone is almost certainly copying its photos and files to iCloud or your Google account already, and that feels like a backup. It is the same sync as above. Delete a photo on the phone and it disappears from the cloud copy too.

Both keep deleted photos in a Recently Deleted or Bin folder for a limited time, usually around 30 days. If something goes missing, look there first and look quickly. After that, it is gone.

So for most trades, the answer is not a separate phone backup product. It is where the job photos live.

Job photos belong in your job software, not in your camera roll. ServiceM8, Tradify and Simpro all take photos against a job, and once a photo is attached to a job it is in the platform’s backup, it is findable in two years when there is an argument about what was there before you started, and it survives the phone going in a puddle. A photo that only exists in your camera roll is one dropped phone, or one wrong tap, away from gone.

That is a habit change rather than a product, and it is worth more than anything you could buy.

What about the accounting file and the job platform?

Xero, ServiceM8 and the rest hold your history and run their own backups. What they do not guarantee is your access to it. An unpaid subscription, a closed account or a locked-out login puts the data behind a door you cannot open, and it is your data on the wrong side of it.

Export your accounts at the end of each financial year and put the file somewhere the Backblaze agent is watching. Once a year, ten minutes. It is not a backup strategy, it is a receipt.

The bit that makes any of this real

A backup nobody has ever restored from is a theory. Once a year, pick one file you would hate to lose, restore it from the backup, and open it. If it opens, you have a backup. If it does not, you have just found out on a Tuesday instead of on the worst day of your year.

We test restores for the Simple Mail mailboxes we run, and we tell clients the result. Do the same for your computer.

If you would rather we just did it

Setting this up on a handful of machines, checking the settings above are right, and showing someone how to restore is about an hour’s work. That is billable, ad hoc or from a support block, and it is not a product we sell you monthly. There is nothing in it for us either way, which is why this page says what it says.