Q&A with Will English: Recently one of our retail clients experienced a computer crash, and it was their main computer. What should they do if they can only find the QuickBooks files for last year to extract but not this year? Why is it important to make regular external backups?
Client: I had my main computer crash on me last week and it’s not recoverable. I have a computer company trying to extract the files out of QuickBooks Financial and QuickBooks Point of Sale (POS), however, they are only coming up with data through 2013; all of 2014 is missing. Is there a file/folder somewhere that perhaps they aren’t looking at/for that I can guide them to where maybe the software automatically backs up the information? I did backups myself but even those are missing some of the data as I didn’t do it on a daily basis. Do you have a suggestion for recovery?
Will: So each time you exit out of the POS program, it should create a backup file depending on the setting. It will be a folder as follows
c:\users\Public\public documents\Intuit\QuickBooks Point of Sale X.0 (where X is your version)\data\X (where X is your company file name)\backup
The newest backup there can be restored. If you want to try to get the data file, it has the file name qbpos.db and is in the company file name folder.
As for QuickBooks Financial, the backups could be anywhere. Search for *.qbb for the backup files and *.qbw for the QuickBooks files.
IMPORTANT REMINDER: Make external backups on a regular basis so if anything ever happens to your computer, your data will still be stored for easy access.
