Best practices for backing up your QuickBooks file

As today we encounter yet another new company with a corrupt QuickBooks file in our outsourced bookkeeping business, its worth sharing the best practices for backing up your data.

QuickBooks gives you a lot of value for the price.   With good values often come tradeoffs, and one tradeoff with QuickBooks is a database that can easily get corrupted.

Most people think they are safe because their server gets backed up every night and the QuickBooks file is on the server.  That’s helpful, but not enough.  To make sure your QuickBooks file doesn’t have data corruption, you need to run a backup inside QuickBooks with “data integrity” turned on.

Data integrity checks to make sure each entry in the database has maintained is linkages.  With QuickBooks transactions there are many linkages: debits with credits, purchase orders linked to jobs and bills, estimates to invoices, etc, etc.. 

We suggest you should run a backup inside QuickBooks as often as you are willing to lose data.  Said another way, if you can afford to rekey a month worth of data then you only need to back up once a month.  At the very least, you should run a back up monthly, when you close the prior period. 

One of the cheapest forms of insurance available is Intuit’s online backup service.  For pennies a day they will automatically backup your QuickBooks file to their secure server. This way you don’t have to count on the office manager to remember to do it for you.  This backup doesn’t provide the data integrity check, but its so cheap its worth it nonetheless.  For more information go to: http://support.quickbooks.intuit.com/Support/OLBC.aspx.

Backups are important, but often not urgent.  As a result, they become something that never gets focused on until its too late. Take five minutes now, run a backup and sign up for Intuit’s online backup service. You’ll thank me later…when it becomes urgent.