Why Make a QuickBooks Backup?

There are a lot of reasons, depending on how your computer system is set up and how you are making backups. You are making backups, right?

• Some automatic backup systems can’t make backups of a file that is open at backup time. The QuickBooks database manager can often hold the file open, interfering with these kinds of backup systems. File open, no backup!
• In some cases, some data may be “buffered” or still in the database manager’s memory, not flushed out to the hard drive. Worse yet, some of the data may be in a transitional state or partially recorded, with half of the data written and half not. A full system backup may take a snapshot of the database as it exists on your hard drive at the time, but that might not be a useable snapshot. The database can be in an intermediate state that when restored, is not useful. Restoring that gives you a corrupted database!
• Some backup systems are set up to focus on particular files. I’ll often see systems set up to focus on the QBW file, your company file. Well, that may be MOST of your QuickBooks data, but it might not be ALL of your QuickBooks data!

Have you checked your backup system to see if it is backing up a useable set of data? Have you checked your backup system to see if you can restore the data, and that the data you restore is complete? Lots of people set up backup systems but don’t test if they are working, until that first time that you need to restore data because of some disaster. That is way too late to be testing your backup system.

Another reason for a QuickBooks backup is that if you create a QBB file, with “complete verification”, then QuickBooks does some housekeeping. As time goes on, if you aren’t doing this, little gremlins are creeping into your QuickBooks data and messing things up (that is a technical description…). Errors start accumulating, which you may not notice at first and may not create problems. However, over time, these accumulated small errors can lead to data corruption and a big, big problem. A properly managed QuickBooks company file should have a full backup using the QuickBooks backup feature once a month in my opinion.

In addition, QuickBooks is keeping a transaction log as you use it, and this transaction log continues to grow. As it grows, it takes up space, and a big log file can slow things down. Making a QBB file clears out the transaction logproperly. Sure, you can just erase the log every once in awhile, but then you have lost one of your disaster recovery features, and that isn’t good. For more on this see my article What is the QuickBooks TLG File.