How To Back Up Quickbooks To a Flash Drive
Hope for the best but prepare for the worst, is usually a good mantra for business owners to follow. Investing a small portion of your time and energy into creating backups of your Quickbooks files will give you the peace of mind knowing that your data is safe in the event of a crash or hardware failure. Let’s hope that nothing happens to your computer or the server storing your data, but if something does happen, you’ll have a backup copy ready to replace the lost data.
Quickbooks allow users to back up their files on a variety of different devices, including local hard drives, CDs, DVDs, external hard drives, and of course USB flash drives. Many users prefer USB flash drives due to their sheer versatility and ease of use. These small pocket-sized devices can be plugged into any practically any computer — assuming it has a USB port (which most modern-day computers do).
To back up your Quickbooks data, open the respective company file (.QBW format) and insert the USB flash drive into your computer’s USB port. Next, click on File > Create backup. This will open the Quickbooks backup wizard, assisting you in the backup process.
Assuming you want to back up your files on the USB flash drive, choose local backup and select the save destination (usually titled ‘Removable storage device’). Select Next and choose whether to back up the data now or at a later time. Quickbooks allows users to schedule backups for a later time, or you can even create a routine backup schedule to perform the backup at a particular time each week. Don’t worry too much about these settings for now, as you can always go back and adjust them in the future. Select Save it now to perform the backup and save the data to your USB flash drive.
Note: you can modify the default name of the backup file by typing the preferred name in the File name field. To change the default destination, click the drop-down arrow next to save and choose the preferred destination.
After completing the steps listed above, click Save to begin the backup process. All Quickbooks backup files are saved in the .QBB extension. Do attempt to change or modify this extension in any way, as doing so may trigger compatibility problems. When the backup is complete, Quickbooks will display a message notifying you of its completion along with the destination of your new backup file.
To view a video tutorial for the process above please see below or visit the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYIabNNLTok