QuickBooks Backups and Responsibilities

What would happen if your Quickbooks is hacked or for some reason becomes corrupt? If you're using Quickbooks Online, it's important to know that the software doesn't provide a backup system. You'll need to have a third-party backup solution in place should you need to undo a mistake or restore your data from an accident or hack. 

We recently made the switch from Desktop to the Online version and were a little shocked to discover the built-in backup solution that Intuit provides is completely inadequate (essentially non-existent.) 

So, we went looking. There are several solutions to choose from, but the one that seemed to have the most robust feature set at a reasonable price was a product called Rewind. 

 
Rewind maintains a continuous backup of all of your files and only costs $14/month for the first Quickbooks company/file.  With Rewind you can restore:  

• individual items, including attachments, reports, expenses, and more. 
• your complete QuickBooks Online files, exactly how you need them. 

Rewind offers a great service at an affordable price, and we feel confident knowing our data is safe and sound! If you're looking for a good backup solution, it only took about 5 minutes to set-up.  Rewind is definitely worth checking out, and they even have a 7-day free trial. 

BTW, this lack of a proper backup solution for a Cloud/Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application is not limited to Intuit. It is a common misconception that SaaS solutions provide a user-level backup and restore solution that is available for you to use.  While they do have system-level backups, that they can use for a major disaster (think entire data center failure), they often do not provide you with the type of restore capability that you would need from the much more common mistakes like data entry error, accidental record deletion, or a myriad of other things that can happen using software on a regular basis. 

For example, one of the largest SaaS products in existence, Microsoft’s Office 365, has wording in their license agreement that encourages users to provide their own backup system.  You can read more about that in our prior Blog article on cloud services here.

So, it is probably worth some of your time this week to check on every cloud/SaaS application you use, and to ask about their backup and restore policies.  Don’t just assume the vendor will be able to help you restore things back after the inevitable boo-boo gets made. 

You can find more information on Rewind here:  https://rewind.com/products/backups/quickbooks-online/ 

For more information on secure backups, please give our experts a call at (815) 836-0030. We would be happy to help secure your QuickBooks and other SaaS products.