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Whether you are a small business owner or accountant, you probably why it’s important to back up your files. Hopefully, nothing will ever happen to your original files. But if disaster strikes, you want a secondary copy on hand to get your operations up and running again. Thankfully, Intuit’s Quickbooks accounting software has a convenient backup feature, allowing users to create a backup copy of their company file on a USB flash drive or similar device. To learn more about this feature and how to use it, keep reading.

To back up your Quickbooks company file, go ahead and open the file from your computer. Assuming you have Quickbooks installed, you can open it simply by right-clicking and choosing “open.” This should launch the Quickbooks application, at which point you can choose File > Save Copy or Backup to open the backup wizard. Next, click Backup copy > Next > Local backup.

Before proceeding, you should click the Options button to set your backup defaults. This gives you greater customization over what’s backed up and where it’s stored. You can also specify the location at which your back up is saved (insert your USB flash drive into your computer and choose it from this options page).

After customizing your backup defaults options, click Next to proceed, followed by Save right now (note: you can choose Save right now and schedule future backups if you’d like Quickbooks to automatically create backups after various intervals). Click Next after choosing either Save right now or Save and schedule.

This step is completely optional, but you can change either the name and/or location of your backup file. Simply type your preferred file name into the name field and click the Save option in the drop-down menu. You can also choose a different location for the backup file. With that said, you should not change the .qbb extension file name, as this may corrupt the file and render it inaccessible. Go ahead and click Save to begin the back up.

During the back up, Quickbooks will check the integrity of your company file using the defaults you chose earlier. This will close your company file and create a new backup. Once complete, Quickbooks will display a message telling you that your company file was successfully backed up to the specified location.

It’s important to note that you can create a backup company file on any device. While this tutorial specifically focused on USB flash drives, you can save your Quickbooks company file to any removable storage device, hard drive or local network folder.

Did this tutorial work for you? Let us know in the comments section below!