 QuickBooks desktop 2023. Restore and backup data files. Let's do it within two weeks. QuickBooks desktop 2023. Support accounting instruction by clicking the link below giving you a free month membership to all of the content on our website broken out by category further broken out by course. Each course then organized in a logical reasonable fashion making it much more easy to find what you need than can be done on a YouTube page. We also include added resources such as Excel practice problems PDF files and more like QuickBooks backup files when applicable. So once again click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it. Here we are on the desktop in this section of the course we will be starting a new company file and working a long problem entering two months of data input into that company file. If you work the problem from start to finish you shouldn't need to restore any backup files in order to go through that process. However if you want to jump forward in the practice problem or if there was an error in the data input there's some kind of problem when working the practice problem and you want to jump back to a prior point or after doing the practice problem you want to redo the practice problem at some point then restoring the backup files can be a useful tool and we're going to try to be able to provide those backup files for you to do so. So first we want to get an idea here of the QuickBooks actual software icon the data files and then the backup files. So if I put my folder I open up my folder here we've included in this folder a couple other folders one is where the backup files are going to be located the other is where the data file is going to be located. Now I've already opened up the sample file which is provided by Intuit the owner of QuickBooks and this is the actual data file so then there's going to be a backup file the backup file I'm going to put right here so we can then see the comparison of the backup file and the data file one more time. So let's go ahead and open up the program I'm going to say double click on the program this is how we're typically going to be opening up the software actually clicking on the program it will typically open to the prior file that we had open in this case I'm just going to open it up to the practice file which was the prior file we had open if you don't have the sample file already set up then you can download the sample file so if it opens up to a company file and you want to go back to the prior screen you can go to the file tab and you can say I'm not going to exit the entire thing here but instead just close the company and that will once again take you back to this intro type of file now in order to get the the files that are provided by Intuit you hit the drop-down here you got the sample sample files for the product based sample for the service based we downloaded the product based sample when you do so it will download not the backup file but it'll generally give you the whole actual file for that practice problem which is going to be this this sample file so if you open that up then that represents for us here the data file so here's the data file here notice whenever you open the data file this is really the data file right here but it gives you all this other junk so you want to make sure that when you open up the data file you put it into its own folder also realized that sometimes as we'll see when we create a new company file QuickBooks might just try to put the data file wherever it wants to put it it might not ask you where to put the data file it's useful to know where the data file is so that you can go in there and find it if there's a problem you got to organize these data files even if you only have one data file you still want to know where the data file is because if you're just working on one company file you might just have one but and then you're also going to want to know where the backup files are if you're a bookkeeper you might have multiple data files for multiple companies and you want to make sure that you're organizing each data file into its own folder typically because that'll make it easier for you to basically see you know where the data files are so make sure you organize the data files once we got the data files we could just do a backup file here so let's open this one up and just do another backup we've seen this in a prior presentation I believe but we'll just recap this backup process so that you can you can get a handle on organizing your backup files so then we're going to go up top I'm going to go and say once I enter the data which might happen at every night for example or we might do this on a on a weekly basis but generally every time you enter new data into the system you're going to want to back up your data there might be multiple reasons you back up the data you want to back up the data to not lose the data you also might back up the data if you're using a practice problem like this and you might you want to have the data in the system you might use backup data that we provide you restoring the backup data which can give you a nice practice file to be working with and that's another reason you might have the backup files you might be backing up the backups in order to test something new try entering a journal entry that you're not sure of and then test it out if you don't like it restore the backup file right so so we can hit the drop down and we can say backup create a local backup I'm going to make a local backup you could set up online backups as well we're just going to make a local backup and I'm going to say next I'm going to save it save it now and then I'm going to find the location hitting the drop down I want to put it I got my desktop QuickBooks file here sample that's not the one that's not the one QuickBooks desktop let's do the backup files notice it saves as a QBB file instead of a QBW file that's a backup file it gives a timestamp for the backup so I'm going to say save and that should save the backup now it takes a little while to back it up depending on how much data is in the system but it shouldn't take too long it's a pretty straightforward standard process so just realize that whenever you're sorting the data and this can be confusing if you decide in the practice problem to try to jump forward in the practice problem rework things in the practice problem then you're going to have multiple QuickBooks files with the same name and multiple backup files so we'll try to give you if we're able to give you the backup files so that you have the capacity to do that to utilize those backup files you need to be able to organize the backup files so and you can see here the backup file in this case it's right here it looks like this it's a backup file if you right click on it and you look at the properties of it then you could see that it's a QBB file as opposed to the data file which is going to be here looks like this this is the thing that is actually opened right click if you look at the properties of this one you could see this is the actual data file which is a QBW file now what I'm gonna do I'm gonna make another folder in here right click and say new folder and I'm gonna call this data file 2 and so and and notice that if you're working a practice problem if I provide you with the data files and you want to rework them then you're gonna have to download the data file and this would only happen if you like if you wanted to jump forward in the practice problem or something like that then you'd have to download the the backup file find the relevant backup file which and they're gonna be numbered and the numbering on the backup file will typically be the after I've completed the file so you want to find the number of the file to the one before the problem you're working on because that will be the backup file through that particular section so if you find the one before that you should have the data file up until or completed until the news thing that you're gonna do in that particular section so then you're gonna have to download the backup file and then you want to save it into a folder where you're gonna know the difference between the current file you're using and the prior file you're using which again you could see gets kind of complex because it's got all this other junk that's gonna come along with it so to see that I'm gonna restore this backup file now so now I'm gonna go back into here I could restore it even though I'm in a company file I could go to the file drop-down and say that I want to restore a company file or if I don't like doing that when I'm already in a company file I could say I want to close the company file that will take me back into this this intro screen I could use the open or restore here I tend to like using the drop-down and I'm gonna go drop-down and open or restore open or restore and we're gonna not open a company file but restore a backup file so I'm gonna say backup copy copy so I'm gonna say next and it's gonna be a local backup because these are actually on our computer so I'm gonna say next and then I'm gonna find the backup files I'm gonna hit the drop-down say okay this is on the desktop QuickBooks there's the there's the data file there's my backup file there it is I'm gonna double click on that now when I restore it what it's gonna do is it's not gonna delete the backup file or convert the backup file it's gonna create another file from the backup file and then and then make another data file with it so where do I want to put it now where do I want the file to go it's gonna go into the QuickBooks I want to put it into the data file and then I made that new folder data file to that's where it's gonna go you might want to change the name of it down here so it's sample business or whatever number two or something like that so I can see the difference it's gonna restore as a QBW because it's restoring the backup file the zipped file to a data file a write file a QBW file the QBW file will be in this location okay save it it could take a little while to restore but it's once you do this a few times it's a pretty standard process QuickBooks is quite you know it's a pretty quite good process you can be good and confident that the backups will work generally so now we've restored another company file so now I've got two files that are the same company file I don't want to get the two mixed up I got to make sure where where's the company file that I'm working on so this is the pros and cons of using the desktop version the capacity for you to have multiple files so you could do things like testing them out and make a backup file then test something out jump forward in a practice problems the cons of course then are that of course you've got to organize the files to make sure that you're using the one that you need to use just like organizing Word documents and anything else so if I go back into my my data files now so now I've got the backup file is still there it didn't delete the backup file I didn't convert this backup file from a QBB file backup file to a QBW write file but instead use the backup file to create another file so now I've got this backup file still there and then in the data files I have the original data file which is right there that I used to make the first backup file and now I've got another data file which we put in here I'm gonna show it this way notice it just gave me all this other junk too so if you have multiple data files going into one folder it's not the end of the world but just notice that folder is gonna be kind of ugly because you're gonna have all this junk in it in each folder so I kind of like if I can do so having a different folder for each data file so I can see all the junk from one file at one place but whatever the data file is right there if I had this data file in with this data file as long as I named it something different so that I can distinguish the two data files here that would be fine and you'd have all this other junk that was saved with it as well so just to recap what we did is we got this is the software when you open up the software like a Word document you will typically have the software and then the file kind of similar to Microsoft Word the program and then the data file that you open in Microsoft Word unlike Microsoft Word with QuickBooks will typically double-click the software which will then open up the latest or last data file typically if it does not then we're gonna locate which file we want to open within the QuickBooks system unlike Microsoft Word we can also have backup files the backup files are important because the data files are so large that or they can get quite large that we don't want to just make a copy of the data file like we might do with a Word document if I had an important Word document I don't need to zip the Word document I can just copy the Word document and put it somewhere else possibly put it in a zipped folder if I want to zip it that way but with with the QuickBooks file we want to when we're saving the file to another location we want to have a zipped file which is going to save some space so we had then our zipped file that that we created for our backup file and then if I need to restore that which you wouldn't always need to restore it remember if you're saving your zipped file for purposes of not wanting to lose the data you want to have it on another drive then the drive we're out here that's not our major goal for this presentation we want to show how to restore and open it but you would want it on an external drive or on the cloud drive but then once you have the backup files you can save multiple backup files to one folder typically they're going to be time stamped and so on so you can distinguish which is the latest one if you were to restore that backup file then that backup file will still be here and you'll create a new data file and then as you create a new data file you want to make sure that you're organized in terms of where the data file is going to go and so that that organization which file am I in not cluttering up your whole computer and so on so on with all bunch of data files and making sure you're working in the proper data file it's just just organization just like a file cabinet that you got to kind of take keep aware of just like you were would with like word documents so that's the general process in the context of the course once again you shouldn't need a lot of the backup files because if you work the problem from start to finish but we're going to try to provide them for key points in the problem to help you to move forward or jump forward if you want work through a particular point or rework something if there was a problem or if you just want to go back and do something again