How to Use Online Back-up & Restore in QuickBooks Online Advanced and Why It Is Important

Imagine this—you or someone from your team accidentally deleted a significant batch of transactions or made unintended changes to your QuickBooks Online data. In such scenarios, having online backups in QuickBooks Online Advanced would be beneficial. You can restore a recent backup file and recover the data as it existed before the unwanted changes or deletions occurred. This saves you from having to manually recreate the data or deal with the consequences of the mistake.

In this blog, we’ll discuss about online backup and restore in QuickBooks Online Advanced and why it is important for businesses. We will also tackle how to back up and restore your data and how to restore your company to a previous state.

What is Online Back-up & Restore, and Why Is it Important?

Available exclusively in QuickBooks Online Advanced, online back-up and restore allows you to regularly back up your company data and restore it to a specific point in time if needed. This feature can be useful for various purposes, such as data migration, data recovery, and archiving.

Regularly backing up your company data helps protect it from various risks, such as accidental deletion, data corruption, hardware failure, or security breaches. For instance, let’s say you accidentally deleted important transactions or encountered a data corruption issue. With online backups, you can easily restore the data to a previous backup point, ensuring that no vital information is permanently lost.

Online back-ups also provide a historical record of your financial data, allowing you to access and review past transactions, reports, and financial statements. This can be useful during a financial audit, where you need to compare the current year’s financial data with previous years. By restoring an older backup, you can retrieve the specific data from that period, facilitating accurate comparisons and ensuring compliance with auditing requirements.

How to Find Your Backups in QuickBooks Online Advanced

To find your backups, click on the gear icon and then select Back up company under Tools. You may be prompted to sign in to your QuickBooks Online account with your email and password. Once you sign in, you will be taken to the Online Back-up & Restore page, as shown below. 

Online back-up and restore page in QuickBooks Online Advanced

On this page, you’ll see the list of your backed-up companies. If you don’t see your company, then you need to add it by clicking the Add company button, selecting the company from the dropdown options, and then tapping Next. Then, select Enable backup for the company you wish to protect. 

How to Restore Your Company Data 

Once you enable backup, QuickBooks will start your backup, and from here on, you can restore your company info to any point in time. To track the backups automatically created by QuickBooks, click on the Backup tab under the left navigation menu bar. You’ll be able to track here all the backups created, when QuickBooks made each backup, and also the number of changes made. You can also create a new manual backup anytime by clicking on the New Manual backup button.

Starting a backup in QuickBooks Online Advanced

Now, if you or a team member accidentally made a mistake or deleted something, you can view the changes to see what has been added or deleted. To do this, click on the arrow next to Action on the recorded change entry and then select View. QuickBooks will display a graph and list of transactions that have been added, modified, or deleted between this backup and the last.

Updated transactions between your current backup and the last

If you wish to restore your company back to this point, select Actions and then click Restore to this backup. QuickBooks will automatically revert the company data to the version you wish to restore it to. 

For detailed instructions on how to use online backup and feature in QuickBooks Online Advanced, you can watch the video below.

Bottom Line

With online backup and restore in QuickBooks Advanced, you can ensure the safety of your company data. Regular backups protect against accidental deletions, data corruption, and potential hardware or software failures. By storing your data securely in the cloud, you can rest easy knowing that your critical financial information is safe and recoverable.