One copy is no copies

If the machine you work on stopped this afternoon, three things would be gone and they would hurt differently. Your records, which you cannot reconstruct. Your templates and rubric, which you could rebuild over a painful weekend. And whatever client material you were holding, which you must not back up at all.

Back up two categories, not three

Records. The sheet with one row per job. Irreplaceable in the strict sense: fees and dates can be partly recovered from platform reports, but minutes per job and your own notes cannot. Everything you need it for is in the records post.

Templates. Rubric, scope wording, reply templates, handover message. Recoverable but expensive, and the version you would rebuild is worse than the one you refined over six months.

Client material. Not backed up. Ever.

The reason for the exclusion is that a backup is by design a copy you do not track, in a location you do not check, retained on a schedule you did not set. For the one category whose entire risk is uncontrolled copies, that is the opposite of what you want. Submitted material lives in one folder on one encrypted device and is deleted at the end of the dispute window, which is the discipline set out in what you hold about buyers.

The discipline

Two copies plus the original, in two different places, one of them not in your house.

For two small files that means the working copy on your machine, an automatic sync to one cloud account, and a monthly manual copy to an external drive. Setup is under an hour and the ongoing cost is a two-minute monthly step that fits inside the ten-minute admin loop.

Keep the synced folder separate from the folder client material lands in. If they are the same folder, or nested, the sync will eventually pick up a submission and you will not notice - this is the single most common way a well-intentioned backup becomes an incident.

Test it once

An untested backup is a belief, not a backup, and the NCSC's backup guidance says the same: once you have made one, check it contains all your important data.

Once, after setting it up, open the cloud copy and the external copy and confirm both open and both are current. Do it again the first time you change tools.

The failure people hit is not corruption. It is discovering that the sync stopped four months ago after a password change, because nothing about a stalled sync is loud. Checking the modified date twice a year catches it.

Device loss is a different problem

A dead laptop costs you files. A stolen one costs you files plus everything on it, which is why full-disk encryption is the prerequisite rather than the extra.

Switch it on, use a passphrase you have not used elsewhere, and know how to remotely wipe the device. If client material is on a device that leaves the house, those three things are what stand between a bad afternoon and the sequence described in what to do if material leaks.

The pattern underneath

Back up what only you have, delete what belongs to someone else, and keep the two in separate places so that no automatic process can confuse them.

That principle is not specific to this trade. Documented handling of measurement records and how long they are retained draws the same line between derived data worth keeping and source material worth deleting, and the published account of how an automated service handles retention is a useful model for stating your own answer in two sentences. Buyers assume something close to this without being told, which is why the buyer-side expectations of a commission are worth reading before you decide your own defaults are generous.

Platform-held records are the one part of this you do not have to solve, and knowing exactly which reports Rate Cock retains for judges, and for how long, tells you which columns in your own sheet are belt-and-braces rather than essential - that is on its judges page.