Backup my Quicken

For the tens of thousands of Quicken users out there, in particular the many home users and the small business operators, Quicken can be a great investment. With the 2008/09 financial year nearly half way through I thought we should remind ourselves of some of key house-keeping rules before we get into the madness of Xmas and other festivities.

Did you know that you run a 1 in 8 chance of your PC crashing? That is regardless of how old the PC is. The reality is that no matter how powerful or efficient they make computers they will always fail, at some stage for whatever reason (sometimes you don’t even have to use it for it to fail).

When you invest in a financial application such as Quicken, you not only forgo the money for the license, you also invest hours upon hours of data entry, analysis and reporting. Obviously Quicken is smart enough to allow you to back-up its files to your C:/ or another drive. For most however, C:/ will do. Well, it will until that crash anyway. The question you need to ask yourself is who is backing up your computer. A: NO BODY!

If the information you hold within your Quicken application is worth more than $71.95 to you and your livelihood, then you might want to consider saving yourself a lot of heart ache by backing it remotely.

Why would you go remote and why would you trust someone else with your financial records?

There are obviously alternatives to going remote eg backing to an external hard drive. This works for most, and then the hard drive its self breaks down. The risk you take with external hard drives is that they require you to complete a manual task each time you run your backup. And being hardware, they are also prone to failure.

Remote backup sends your data via the internet to a remote site for it to be stored securely on servers. Companies have been doing this for years, now these services have been opened up to small business and the everyday consumer.

Is there a risk in giving your data to someone else? All backup services use encryption to protect your data whilst it’s being transferred. They also keep it encrypted whist it’s being stored. Businesses who provide these services wouldn’t be in business for very long if they didn’t keep your information secure and protected.

Carbonite is remote back-up, using the internet to transfer your files securely to a place where no one can interfere with them, or lose them. It does this for you automatically, all day every day, and you don’t have to remind it. The beauty of Carbonite is that it is a ’set and forget’ program. For $71.95 per year you can not only back up Quicken, you can back up all of the files on your PC. And with newer versions of Quicken there isn’t any need to even configure it. Once installed, your Quicken files are always backed up. No matter what.

If you are running an older version of Quicken or Quick Books, you might need to consider the following:

The Easy Way
Open My Computer and double-click the icon for your C: drive. Right-click the folder entitled ‘Documents and Settings’ and select ‘Back this up’ from the Carbonite context menu. (If the only option you see is ‘Don’t back this up’, Carbonite was already set to back up that folder.)

The Hard Way
Quicken data files are typically stored in either C:\\Documents and Settings\\<your>\\My Documents\\Quicken\\ or C:\\Program Files\\Quicken\\. (<your> will obviously vary. If you don’t see your own name, your files are most likely in something generic, such as ‘Owner’ or ‘User’.)

Quickbooks data files are typically stored in either C:\\Documents and Settings\\All Users\\(Shared) Documents\\Intuit\\Quickbooks\\Company Files or C:\\Program Files\\Intuit\\Quickbooks

Browse to the folder that contains your files using the information above.
If you see that the files already have colored dots on their icons, Carbonite is already set up to include your Quicken files in your backup. If the files do not have colored dots, right-click the folder and select Back this up from the Carbonite context menu.