As we discussed last month, backing up with a tool like carbonite is just not enough for Quickbooks. Quickbooks is where you have poured your company’s accounting history, check by check, deposits by deposit. If you have not been backing up regularly you are in a world of tears should your Quickbooks file go ka-put on you, or worse yet, your computer fries, or gets stolen.
First let’s discuss what to back up. When you run Quickbooks it is a file that ends in qbw. Just like a Word document ends in doc or Excel ends in xls, Quickbooks has its own distinct extension and it is qbw. If you use a backup system like Carbonite, it will backup whatever is on your harddrive and that would be the Quickbooks software and your Quickbooks company file that ends in qbw.
However, for a good, verified backup, Quickbooks has an internal backup inside the software. When your Quickbooks company file is open, go to File, Create Backup, Local Backup and follow prompts on where to save the backup. When Quickbooks is done, it creates a file that ends in qbb. That is your Quickbooks internal, verified backup. This backup process inside the program is Quickbooks’s way of going through the data and “looking” at the integrity to make sure the file is not corrupt.
A third level of backup is what Quickbooks calls Rebuild. This process doesn’t just “look” it cleans the data file and actually condenses the file size a little more than the backup feature does. To do a Rebuild, go to File, Utilities, Rebuild Data, and follow the prompts. It will create a down and dirty backup (qbb) file before it Rebuilds, just incase the Rebuild process goes south. We recommend then doing a regular Quickbooks backup after the Rebuild.
How often to backup, you ask? The answer really lies with you. How much data in between backups are you willing to lose if your computer crashes or one of your backups ends up corrupted?
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Whenever I set up a new client’s company file, I am now setting them up to back up at the end of every day or whenever the file is closed and asking them to log off at a minimum of once a week so this occurs as well.