Back up and restore your QuickBooks Online Advanced company

Learn how to back up and restore your QuickBooks Online Advanced company.

Back up your company data to keep a copy of your financial records. This keeps your information safe and gives you peace of mind. You can also undo unwanted changes to suppliers, customers, settings, and other data if you need to. Here's how.

Note: If you want to create a new company and use data that exists, you can make a copy instead.

In this article, you'll learn how to:

• Check what data you can and can’t back up
• Check what data you can’t restore
• Turn on backup
• Turn off backup
• Create a one-time backup manually
• Save your backups to Google Drive
• Restore your data from the Restore tab
• Restore your data from the Backups tab
• Understand your limitations with data retention

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Check what data you can and can’t back up

You can back up some of your data, but not all of it. Here's what you can and can't back up.

Data you can back up

Data you can't back up

• QuickBooks Online Payments info
• Customer types and price rules
• Delayed credits and charges (although associated invoices are backed up)
• Recurring transactions
• Bank feeds and their links to transactions and bank rules
• Reconciliation reports
• Account-based billable expenses
• Item-based billable expenses with markup
• Custom reports
• Custom form templates
• Audit log entries
• Reconciliation reports do not move/back up
• Reconciled transactions do not remain reconciled

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Check what data you can’t restore

When you restore a backup, you can restore everything except:

• Budgets - You need to save them as a CSV file.
• Inventory - It doesn’t include the inventory history and inventory adjustments.
• Sales tax rates using expense accounts - The Online Backup and Restore app puts them back in your liability accounts.
• Data backed up using the personal cloud archive feature - This data is saved in .cab format on your cloud account, like Google Drive. Right now, you can't restore data from a cloud archive.

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Turn on backup

QuickBooks backs up your data automatically when you turn on the Online Backup and Restore app. Once finished, it’ll track changes made to your company data. Then, you can restore a backup at any point in time.

1. Go to Settings and select Account and settings.
2. Select Advanced, then select Backup.
3. Select Edit ✎, then turn on the Turn on backups switch.
4. Select Save, then select Done.

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Turn off backup

1. Go to Settings and select Account and settings.
2. Select Advanced, then select Backup.
3. Select Edit ✎, then turn off Turn on backups.
4. Fill out the consent form, then select Turn off Backup.
5. Select Save, then select Done.

Note: You can also turn backup on/off when you go to Settings , then select Back up company, and then Change backup settings.

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Create a one-time backup manually

If you're in the middle of an important project and you want to save everything, you can do a manual backup anytime. Here’s how.

1. Go to Settings .
2. Select Back up company.
3. Select Run manual backup.
4. Select Full, then select Back up.

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Save your backups to Google Drive

You can save your backups to Google Drive and then export them. You'll have to connect your account to it. Here’s how.

Connect your Google Drive account

1. Go to Settings and select Account and settings.
2. Select Advanced, then select Personal cloud backup.
3. Select Link Google Drive.
4. Enter the email address where you want to save your backup file. Then, follow the next steps to agree to create files in your drive.

Export your backup

1. Go to Settings and select Back up company.
2. Select Personal cloud archive. 
3. Select Export backup, then select Google Drive.
4. Select Export backup.

Note: It may take 10 minutes or more to see the file in Google Drive. During this process, you can't use Online Backup and Restore to get back data saved in the Personal cloud archive.

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Restore your data from the Restore tab

Use the Restore tab to restore your data from a specific date and time.

Important: Don't use your company data while the Online Backup and Restore app restores it. When it’s ready, its status will show a checkmark. That’s when you can go back and use it again.

1. Go to Settings and select Back up company.
2. Select Restore, then select Create Restore.
3. From the Date field, select the date you want to restore.
4. From the Time ▼ dropdown menu, select or enter the time you want to restore.
5. Select Next, then read, understand, and follow the instructions given.
6. Select the checkbox next to I understand that restoring overwrites all data in my company back to the specified date. 
7. Then select Start Restore.

Tip: It can take up to an hour to restore a backup, but it often takes less time. The less data the company has, the faster it takes.

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Restore your data from the Backups tab

Use the Backups tab to restore a specific backup without changing the date and time manually. Here’s how.

1. Go to Settings and select Back up company.
2. Select Backups.
3. Select the backup you want to restore from the backup list ▼ dropdown menu next to the View column.
4. Select Restore.
   Note: You can’t change the date and time to restore from here.
5. Select Next, then read, understand, and follow the instructions given.
6. Select the checkbox next to I understand that restoring overwrites all data in my company back to the specified date. 
7. Then select Start Restore.

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Understand your limitations with data retention

Consider the following when using the Online Backup and Restore app:

• It saves all backup snapshots taken in the last year. 
• Backups that are older than one year won't be retrievable by the company. 
• You can restore company data to within one previous calendar year.

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