How We Protect Your Inspection Data
Your reports are legal records. Some of them get read years after the inspection, when something goes wrong and somebody needs to know what you saw that day. Losing one is not an inconvenience — so we build as if that must never happen.
Last updated: August 23, 2026
The short version. Every inspection report, photo, client record and signed agreement is backed up automatically. The database is copied every 30 minutes and files and photos every 10 minutes, onto a second server run by a different hosting company in a different data centre. Every backup is checked for completeness before it is kept, and a backup that fails the check is thrown away rather than quietly stored.
What gets backed up
Everything your business runs on, not just the reports:
- Inspection reports, including drafts in progress
- Inspection photos and annotations
- Client and agent records
- Signed agreements and service documents
- Scheduling, pricing and company settings
How often, and how much you could lose
The honest measure of a backup is not how often it runs, but how much work disappears if the worst happens at the worst moment.
| What | Copied | Worst-case loss |
|---|---|---|
| Reports, clients, agreements | Every 30 minutes | About 30 minutes |
| Photos and uploaded files | Every 10 minutes | About 10 minutes |
Backups are kept on a rolling schedule — recent copies every half hour, plus a daily copy retained for 30 days. The daily copies matter for a different kind of problem: not a server failing, but a mistake nobody noticed until later. If something was deleted or damaged last week, last week's copy is still there.
Two companies, not one
A second copy on the same machine protects against very little. Ours lives on a server at a different hosting company, in a different data centre, so that an outage, an account problem or a hardware failure at one provider does not take both copies with it.
That second server is kept loaded and ready rather than holding backup files that would still need unpacking. The point of a standby is that it is already standing.
Why we verify every backup
This is the part most people never check, and it is the part that decides whether a backup is real.
A backup can fail in a way that leaves a file behind. The file has a sensible name, a plausible size, a recent timestamp — and holds only part of your data. Nothing looks wrong until the day you need it, which is the worst possible day to find out.
So every backup we take has to pass three checks before we keep it:
- It opens cleanly. The archive is tested, not assumed.
- It finished. A completed database export ends with a specific marker. A backup cut short does not have one, and that absence is exactly what a truncated file looks like.
- It is all there. The number of database objects inside is counted and compared against what should be present.
A backup that fails any of these is discarded, and the failure is recorded. We would rather see a logged failure than keep a file that lies to us.
On top of that, the second server is rebuilt from the newest backup on every cycle. That means the restore itself — the step that actually matters — runs continuously, instead of being attempted for the first time during an emergency.
Your data is yours alone
InspectorData hosts many inspection companies on one platform, and every record is tied to the company that created it. Every request is filtered by that company, so one inspector's reports, photos, clients and pricing are never visible to another.
Traffic to the site is encrypted in transit, and reports shared with clients and agents open through per-report links rather than exposing anything else in your account.
You keep your own copy too
Good backups are ours to run, but your work should not depend entirely on us. Finished reports export as PDFs and photos can be downloaded, so you can keep your own records independently of the platform. We think you should — any software company telling you their backups make yours unnecessary is overselling.
Common questions
Are my home inspection reports backed up?
Yes — automatically, without you doing anything. Reports, photos, clients and agreements are copied to a second company's server every 10 to 30 minutes depending on the type of data, and each copy is checked for completeness before it is kept.
How much work could I lose if the server went down?
At most about 30 minutes of report and client changes, and about 10 minutes of photo uploads. Those are the intervals at which the second copy is refreshed.
How do you know the backups actually work?
Because we check rather than assume. Every backup must open cleanly, carry the marker that only appears when an export finishes, and contain the expected number of database objects. Anything failing those checks is discarded. The second server is also reloaded from the newest backup on every cycle, so the restore path is exercised continuously.
Can another inspection company see my reports?
No. Every record is tied to your company and every request is filtered by it. Another company cannot reach your reports, photos, clients or pricing.
What happens to my reports if I stop using InspectorData?
They stay yours. Finished reports can be exported as PDFs and photos downloaded, so you keep your work whatever you decide about the software.
Do you keep older versions, or only the latest?
Both. Recent copies are kept on a rolling half-hourly basis, and a daily copy is retained for 30 days — so a problem discovered a week later can still be recovered from.
Questions about your data
If you have a question this page does not answer — about your own account, an export, or how something specific is stored — ask us. We would rather explain it than have you guess.