QuickBooks® 2012 For Dummies®, UK Edition

Chapter 17

File Management Tips

In This Chapter

Backing up QuickBooks data

Deciding when and how often to back up your data

Restoring your QuickBooks data (if you lose it)

Creating and using portable files

Using the Audit Trail

Okay, you don’t need to worry about the data files in which QuickBooks stores your financial information. Pretty much, QuickBooks does all the dirty work. But that said, you do have a few housekeeping tasks to take care of. In this chapter, we describe these chores and how to do them correctly with minimal hassle.

Backing Up Is (Not That) Hard to Do

Sure, we can give you some tricky, technical examples of fancy backup strategies, but they have no point here. You want to know the basics, right?

The guiding rule is that you back up any time you work on something that you wouldn’t want to redo. Some people think that a week’s worth of work is negligible and others ...