How often should you back up QuickBooks Point of Sale data?

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Creating a backup

Believe it or not, we often get calls from people that have had a computer crash, they’ve lost their QuickBooks Point of Sale data and are trying to recover it. Our first question is, when did you last back up your data? You’d be surprised at how many people say that their last POS backup was over a month ago.

Could you re-enter all those transactions that have taken place? I know I couldn’t. So, here’s the question…  How often should I backup my data?  The answer lies in another question. How much of the data you’ve entered since the last backup can you re-enter in order to bring your data up to date? In most cases backing up once a day would be an absolute minimum. The next thing is, WHERE are you backing up? If you backup your data on the same computer your QuickBOoks POS data file is on and your computer crashes, guess what? You probably just lost your backup too. If you’re running on a network and have a network server, that server is most likely being backed up on a daily basis. With QuickBooks POS you can save your backup to the network server. Now you have a backup on a different computer AND that computer is most likely being backed us as well! If you’re running on a stand-alone system you can copy the QuickBooks POS backup file to a flash drive (also known as a thumb drive) or to a CD so that you have a copy stored in another location other than just on that computer.

The nice thing about this is that you can include backing up your data as a part of the End-of-Day function in QuickBooks Point of Sale. That way when you click the End of Day button on the navigator page QuickBooks POS will create the backup for you without you having to take that extra step yourself.