Quick Books® 2010 All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter 2. Protecting Your Data

In This Chapter

• Backing up the QuickBooks data file

• Restoring the QuickBooks data file

• Archiving and condensing QuickBooks data

In this chapter, I tell you how to protect your QuickBooks data. Principally, protecting your data requires that you back up the data. If you back up your data, you have a second copy available in case the original data file goes bad or becomes corrupted. Because archiving and data file compression are related to backing up and restoring QuickBooks data files, I also talk about archiving in this chapter. When you archive QuickBooks data files, you create a permanent record of the data files. You also have the option of condensing the current working data file.

Backing Up the QuickBooks Data File

A critically important task that either you or some co-worker needs to complete is to back up the QuickBooks data file. I respectfully suggest that few items stored on your computer's hard drive deserve as much caretaking as the QuickBooks data file. Quite literally, the QuickBooks data file describes your business's financial affairs. You absolutely don't want to lose the data file. Losing the data file, for example, might mean that you don't know how much money you have, you don't know whether you're making or losing money, and you won't be able to easily or accurately prepare your annual tax returns.

Backing up basics

Fortunately, backing up the QuickBooks data file is rather straightforward. You need to complete only three steps:

1. Choose ...