QuickBooks 2013 For Dummies

Backing Up Is (Not That) Hard to Do

Sure, I 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 anytime 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 think that a month’s worth of work is negligible.

So here’s what I do to back up my files. I back up every week after I enter my data for the week. Then I stick the disc (you might use any removable disc, such as a USB flash drive, or a writable CD) in my briefcase so that if something terrible happens (like a meteor hitting my office building), I don’t lose both my computer and the backup disc with the data. (I carry my briefcase around with me — a sort of middle-age security blanket — so that it won’t get destroyed in some after-hours disaster.)

Sounds like a pretty good system, huh? Actually, I admit that my strategy has its problems:

Because I back up weekly, I might have to re-enter as much as a week’s worth of data if the computer crashes toward the end of the week. In my case, I wouldn’t lose all that much work. However, if you’re someone with heavy transaction volumes — if you prepare hundreds of invoices or write hundreds of ...