Know where your data is

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So the other day I was needing to get a backup of a QuickBooks file from someone for a project. In my office we get a copy for purposes of forensic an
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Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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Chris B, lmacri

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I support a pair of clients, one of which uses QuickBooks Desktop hosted in Right Networks, and the other uses QBO, and I must confess I’ve become reliant on the notion that since these are both cloud-hosted they’re “already backed up”.

Reading your post has reminded me that this is not necessarily the case.

Any suggestions on how to back up both of these with a minimum of cost and hassle?  For the former, I suppose I can just do a backup within the RN environment and offload the files, but QBO seems trickier.

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Search in the app store on QuickBooks online for “backup”.  QB online has one natively but it’s only in the advanced subscription

• QuickBooks Online Advanced is the only plan that includes online back-up and restore at no additional cost.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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For the other, since it’s normal desktop just in a remote server, I’d just do a normal quickBooks backup routine and either save it to something like onedrive that you can then get to locally.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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Guessing your plagiarism, the late Douglas Adams was spot on!  He’d be having a field day in the current digital climate…

Tony H.
Bristol UK

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My plagiarism?

Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher

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Yes, there are multiple references in the The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books to “Knowing where your towel is”.  I thought you were alluding to that.  Sorry!

Tony H.

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There should be an offline backup of all data.

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Not only is it not on your laptop, the average ‘flunky’ may not understand  fields. I had written a database many years ago to keep track of something or other (specifics lost in a fog of many Access databases written).

One of the staff couldn’t figure out why performing a  search she could not find a record. It turned out when she wrote the record,  data in the relevant memo field didn’t all fit in the space provided on screen. She finished as far as she could see and tabbed to the field below to complete the record.

 

 

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Elrod

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I don’t know how many times this one has happened to me, but the number is up there.  It’s just like filling out a piece of paper, right?  It’s all just spaces, people can read what’s in the next box and see what I meant.

 

Group "L": Linux Mint

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An example of Susan’s point no 2. A few months ago I called an electrician I had dealt with to get a job done. When I said “you have my contact details from prior jobs”, he did not. All his customer  contact data was held in the  cloud by his supplier. They lost it all in a hack and so did he. The supplier did not have an adequate backup. Disaster.

Chris
Win 10 Pro x64 Group A

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I know that my use case is different than businesses or corporations, but my philosophy has always been:    My data, My storage.

(…and I have backups of my backups!)

Win10 Pro x64 22H2, Win10 Home 22H2, Linux Mint + a cat with 'tortitude'.

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SueW, Tom-R, wavy, oldfry, NaNoNyMouse

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Still amazes me in this day and age how non-grandmas still don’t know the difference between something accessed via a locally installed desktop app, and via their web browser.

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Unfortunately, some people do not understand how computers “think” i.e. the system whereby they operate.  They just learn to do what they need by rote learning the keystrokes. That may not fully change until all age groups have been brought up with computers.

Chris
Win 10 Pro x64 Group A

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Every generation now living has been brought up with any number of appliances: cars, washing machines, ovens, air conditioners, furnaces, etc. Very few people know much, if anything, about how these appliances work. You turn them on, push a few buttons, they do what you want, and they turn themselves off. In short, they just work. Yes, they do break from time to time, but generally they seem to be far more reliable than computers.

I don’t want to get to much into anecdotal evidence, but It’s a very rare day when there is not something wrong with at least one of my computers. These are not usually problems that brick my machines, but they do make me wonder if they are actually working correctly. (I can provide examples upon request, although a quick read through thread topics here at AskWoody will give a pretty good idea of what goes wrong.)

Computers are complicated, but so are most of the appliances I’ve listed above, and if they “just work” then computers should “just work”, too. The fact that they often don’t, I lay squarely at the feet of the computer manufacturers and associated software writers. There is no other consumer product that I’m aware of that comes with the expectation that it needs weekly updates, maintenance, or whatever you want to call it. Even my Linux Mint computers average about one patch/update per day. Any other product requiring that much maintenance/repair would be deemed a Lemon.

The computer industry has done a masterful job at duping the public into thinking the incessant patch/update cycles are necessary and expected due to the great difficulty of their jobs.

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Steve, SueW, oldfry

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+1 very true.

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