Your Tool Photos and Manuals Are Backed Up Off-Site Every Night

I previously wrote about what CraftedTracker collects and who can see it. This is the other half of that promise: what happens to it if something goes wrong on my end.

I'm the one person running this, and I'd rather tell you exactly what's in place than ask you to assume. So here's what's true as of this week.

Two kinds of things you put in, backed up two ways

Everything in your account is one of two things.

Records — the tool itself, its serial number, what you paid, its hours, every maintenance note, every timer session. These live in a database. The company that hosts that database takes a full backup of it every day, on their schedule, kept for a rolling window. That has been true since the paid hosting plan went on, and I verified the backups were actually being taken, not just promised, on September 9.

Files — the photos of each tool, the receipt you snapped, the PDF manual you attached. These don't live in the database. They live in file storage, and until this week, that storage was the only copy. If I had made a bad mistake, or the hosting company had lost a disk, your records would have survived and the pictures would not.

That gap closed on September 10.

What the nightly copy does

Every night at around 2 am Pacific, a small job runs on a separate service, not on my computer and not on the app's servers. It copies every file in the app's storage to a private storage bucket at a different company, in a different data center. Then it checks its own work: it reads the list of files at the source and confirms every one of them is present in the copy. If a single file is missing, the run fails loudly and I hear about it.

Two details matter more than the rest:

• A deleted file isn't deleted from the copy. If a file disappears or gets replaced at the source, the copy keeps the old one for 180 days before letting it go. The most likely disaster isn't a data center fire. It's someone, possibly me, deleting the wrong thing. Half a year is enough time to notice.
• The copy has been tested. The first run didn't just copy files. It pulled one back out of the copy and compared it, byte for byte, with the original. They matched. I'll repeat that drill from time to time, because a backup nobody has ever restored from is a hope, not a backup.

What it doesn't do, said plainly

It isn't a time machine. If you replace a photo three times in a week, the copy holds the version from last night plus whatever was replaced in the last 180 days, not a snapshot of every hour.

It isn't a substitute for your own export, either. The app can hand you your whole inventory as a spreadsheet any time you like, and I'd still suggest doing that once in a while and keeping it somewhere you control. Belt and suspenders.

And it isn't a window into your data for anyone. The key that runs the nightly copy can read and write file storage and nothing else. It cannot open a single table. Even if that key leaked, your serial numbers and prices would be out of its reach.

Why I'm telling you the boring version

Most apps say "your data is safe" and leave it there. I'd rather you know that it's two backups, one of them new, with a 180-day undo on files, checked nightly, restored once on purpose to prove it works. If any of that changes, this post will change with it.

If you're weighing whether to put your shop's records into a solo maker's app, that's a fair thing to weigh. This is my answer.

Questions about any of this? Write to support@craftedtracker.com. I read every one.