22 June 2026
If you're a tradie — electrician, plumber, builder, painter, gasfitter, or any other trade — your business generates more data than you probably realise.
Job files, certificates, before-and-after site photos, quotes, signed contracts, supplier correspondence, equipment manuals, compliance records: it all adds up. And for most tradies, it lives in exactly one place — a phone, a laptop, or whatever cloud service came bundled with their phone.
That's not a backup. That's a single point of failure waiting to happen.
Before-and-after site photos. When a client disputes the scope of work, questions the condition something was in when you arrived, or wants to see what was done, your photos are the record. If a photo only exists on your phone and the phone breaks, that record is gone.
Compliance certificates and records. Electricians hold Certificates of Compliance (CoCs). Gasfitters have their own certification requirements. Plumbers have sanitary records. These documents are required by law to be issued, retained, and traceable.
Signed quotes and contracts. If a job goes wrong, or a client refuses to pay, your signed quote is the document that defines what was agreed. If it only lives in your email or on your laptop and either is lost or damaged, you may have no written record of the agreement.
Invoices and financial records. IRD requires you to keep financial records for seven years. If your records are only on a laptop that dies in year four, you have a compliance problem.
Phone breaks or gets stolen. A phone on a work site takes more punishment than most devices. Falls, water, drops onto concrete, theft from a van — a tradie's phone has a hard life. If your job photos are only on your phone, one dropped phone costs you every photo on it.
Van break-in. Tradespeople are targeted for van break-ins across New Zealand. A stolen van often means stolen equipment including laptops, tablets, and chargers — and anything not backed up goes with them.
Laptop hard drive failure. Average laptop hard drive lifespan is three to five years. When the drive fails, recovery is expensive, slow, and not guaranteed.
You don't need IT support to do this. The entire setup takes about 15 minutes.
Install the TPT Backup PWA on your phone. Go to Settings and enable camera roll sync on WiFi. From that point, every photo you take on site is automatically uploaded to your backup account the next time you're on WiFi. You don't have to do anything.
If you keep quotes, invoices, certificates, and other documents in folders on your laptop, connect your laptop to TPT Backup and set up the file backup through the web interface.
Connect your inbox via IMAP — this works with Gmail, Outlook, Microsoft 365, Yahoo, and any email provider that supports IMAP. Your emails sync nightly.
TPT Backup Pro gives you 200 GB for $5/month — enough for several years of job site photos, your full document archive, and your email history. Start with 5 GB free.
Start your tradie backup — 5 GB free, no credit card →
Yes. Camera roll sync runs in the background. You don't need to open the app for it to work. The sync runs when you connect to WiFi.
Yes. You can generate signed download links for individual files from the web interface. The link is time-limited and gives direct access to that file without requiring the recipient to log in.
All files are stored in their original format — JPEGs are JPEGs, PDFs are PDFs. Nothing is converted or locked into a proprietary format.