Guest Post by Shannon Tucker
My phone rings, and I’m talking with a QuickBooks user about their catastrophe: QuickBooks won’t open – it gets fatal errors – and the auditors are coming in two days.
Me: “How is your backup situation?”
Customer: “Not so good. I thought someone else was taking care of that, but it turns out that our last good backup was from about a year ago.”
Ouch.
Customer: “I’ve got to get a solution here, or there’s a good chance I’ll get fired.”
It’s hard to overstate the importance of accounting data to a business. But it’s easy to treat it so casually, especially when it comes to having a good backup process in place.
So here are some principles to put into practice. They can save you headaches, and just maybe, your job.
1. Make frequent backups of current data
How often should you backup QuickBooks? Well, how much data would you like to rekey? There’s your answer. If you wouldn’t mind rekeying a week’s worth of data, then weekly backups are OK for you.
2. Make other backups for permanent keeping
Make a backup and store it permanently for these situations:
• When you have finalized the books for the year
• Before you upgrade to a newer version
• Before you archive/condense
Take these kinds of backups, label them descriptively (“Mycompany QB backup before 2010 upgrade”), and
3. Store your backups off-site
If you have a fire in your workplace, what good would your on-site backup do you? Take your backups home or put them in your safe deposit box.
4. Figure out what backup method works best for you
• Online backup service
Intuit has one, and there are lots of 3rd party backup services out there now. Most cost a nominal monthly fee (Intuit’s starts at $4.95/month). When you put your backup in ‘the cloud’, you don’t have to worry about the physical protection of the backup anymore. And if you schedule a regular backup this way, it’s probably the most worry-free and automatic way.
• USB drive
You can fit a lot of data on a 32GB thumb drive, and they are very affordable. You can password-protect the drive for more security. And just keep the drive in your purse or pocket, so your backup goes offsite automatically when you do.
• Your server
If your data lives on the server, and the server automatically gets backed up, then that’s easy. Just make sure that the server backups go somewhere offsite. I talk to people sometimes who only have backups on the server, which then crashes…
5. One more quick tip: If QuickBooks ever crashes on you, make a quick backup of your damaged data before you try to restore any of your backups. (Obviously, don’t overwrite any of your good backups.) If you need to get your data repaired, we prefer to work first on your most current version of damaged data. So save it off before you overwrite it with older backups.
Authors bio
Shannon Tucker has been writing and working with PC accounting software and repairing damaged accounting databases for over 20 years. In 2001 he launched QuickBooksUsers.com which today is the most highly praised and popular independent support forum for QuickBooks users. He lives in the mountain town of Buena Vista, Colorado, with his wife and daughters and a small menagerie of pets.
When he’s not bailing out people with damaged QuickBooks files, Shannon dabbles in songwriting and skiing.
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