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Back up and restore your QuickBooks Online Advanced Company

by Intuit•5• Updated 1 week ago

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

Save a backup of your company so you always have a copy of your chart of accounts. You can also undo unwanted changes to suppliers, customers, settings, and other data if you need to.

In this article, you'll learn how to:

Note: If you want to use an existing company's data to start a new one, you can create a copy of it instead of a backup.

Find out what data you can and can’t back up

While you can back up data related to your chart of accounts, there is some data you can't back up. Here’s a list of data you can and can’t back up.

Transaction dataList dataOther data
• Invoices 
• Estimates 
• Sales 
• Receipts 
• Payments 
• Deposits
• Bills and bill payments 
• Credit notes 
• Supplier credits 
• Journal entries 
• Purchases and purchase orders 
• Refund receipts 
• Time activities 
• Transfers		• Accounts 
• Budgets 
• Classes
• Currencies 
• Customers
• Departments 
• Employees
• Items 
• Payment methods 
• Tax agencies 
• Tax codes and tax rates 
• Terms
• Suppliers (except the Tax fields)		• Attachments
• Company Info 
• Entitlements 
• Exchange rates 
• Preferences 
• Inventory shrinkage and adjustments back up as journal entries






Some data can't be backed up. Since this data is non-posting, it won't affect your accounts:

  • 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

Learn what data you can’t restore

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

  • Budgets - you need to export them as a CSV file.
  • Inventory - it doesn’t include the inventory history and inventory adjustments.
  • Tax rates using expense accounts - the Online Backup and Restore app restores them in your liability accounts.
  • Data backed up using the personal cloud archive feature - This data is saved in .cab format on your personal cloud account; Google Drive, for example. Restoring the data from a personal cloud archive is not supported at this time.

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Manually create a one-time backup

Maybe you're in the middle of an important project and want to save everything. No problem. You can do a manual backup anytime. Here’s how.

  1. Go to Settings Settings gear icon. and select Back up company.
    Note: You might need to sign in with Intuit Account to proceed.
  2. Select Add company.
  3. Select the Select Company ▼ dropdown, then select the company you want to back up.
  4. Select Continue.
    Note: If you have multiple companies to back up, repeat steps 2 to 4. 
  5. Find the company you want to back up.
  6. Select three dot menu from the Action column, then select Run backup.

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Save your backups to Google Drive

You can save your backups to Google Drive when you link your account. Here’s how to set everything up.

Connect your Google Drive account

  1. Go to Settings Settings gear icon. and select Back up company.
    Note: You might need to sign in with Intuit Account to proceed.
  2. Select the User menu.
  3. Select where you want to save your backup. Select Link Google Drive.
  4. Follow the steps to allow QuickBooks to create backups.
    Note: This may take 10 minutes or more to see the file in Google Drive. Also, data saved using personal cloud archive cannot be restored using Online Backup and Restore at this time.

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Restore your data from a backup

Use the backup to restore your data from a specific date and time. It may take up to an hour to restore a backup, but it usually takes much less. The fewer data the company has, the faster it takes.

Important: Don't do anything in your company while the Online Backup and Restore app restores your data. When it’s ready, you'll see a tick in the status. That’s when it’s safe to go back and use your company.

  1. Go to Settings Settings gear icon. and select Back up company.
    Note: You might need to sign in with Intuit Account to proceed.
  2. Find the company you want to restore a back of.
  3. Select three dot menu from the Action column, select Restore.
  4. From the Date field, select the date you want to restore.
  5. From the Time ▼ dropdown, select the time you want to restore.
  6. Select Next. Follow the instructions given.
  7. Select Start Restore.

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The Online Backup and Restore app saves all backup snapshots taken in the last 1 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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