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Back up and restore your QuickBooks Online Advanced Company

SOLVED•by QuickBooks•5•Updated 3 weeks 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.

Restoring data

Note: If you made customers, suppliers, or items inactive since your last backup, they stay inactive.

You can restore as far back as your first backup.

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.
  • Stock - it doesn’t include the stock history and stock adjustments.
  • VAT rates using expense accounts - the Online Backup and Restore app restores them in your liability accounts.
  • Data backed up using the Local Backup feature - This data is saved in .cab format on your personal cloud account; Google Drive or Dropbox, for example. Restoring the data from a local backup is not supported at this time.

Fix issues if customers migrated data from QuickBooks Desktop

Did you migrate your company from QuickBooks Desktop to QuickBooks Online Advanced? Some data may come over that isn't readable in QuickBooks Online. That also means the Online Backup and Restore app won't save it.

This is very uncommon, but if you see an error message during the backup, select the Contact us link in the app. We'll work with you to fix the error and get the data into QuickBooks.

Learn how to back up your company data at specific points in time

In QuickBooks Online Advanced, you can save online backups of your accounting data. Backups save everything on your chart of accounts. You can schedule automatic backups, do one-time manual backups, and even save copies to DropBox or Google Drive. Here's how to set everything up and restore your data so you can always step back to where you need to be.

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 
• VAT codes and VAT rates 
• Terms
• Suppliers (except the Tax fields)		• Attachments
• Company Info 
• Entitlements 
• Exchange rates 
• Preferences 
• Intuit Payroll info backs up as journal entries 
• Stock 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.
  • Stock - it doesn’t include the stock history and stock adjustments.
  • VAT rates using expense accounts - the Online Backup and Restore app restores them in your liability accounts.
  • Data backed up using the Local Backup feature - This data is saved in .cab format on your personal cloud account; Google Drive or Dropbox, for example. Restoring the data from a local backup is not supported at this time.

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Turn on the Online Backup and Restore app for your data

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

  1. Go to Settings ⚙.
  2. Select Back up company.
    Note: You might need to sign in to your Intuit account to proceed.

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Turn off automatic backup

If you no longer need to backup your company, here’s how to turn it off.

  1. Sign in to the QuickBooks Online Advanced company you want to back up, as an admin.
  2. Go to Settings ⚙ and select Back up company.
    • Note: You might need to sign in to your Intuit account to proceed.
  3. Find the company with the automatic backup you want to turn off.
  4. Select the Action ▼ dropdown menu, then select Turn off Backup.
  5. Enter the text "AGREE," then select Turn off Backup.

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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. Sign in to the QuickBooks Online Advanced company you want to back up, as an admin.
  2. Go to Settings ⚙ and select Back up company.
    • Note: You might need to sign in with Intuit account to proceed.
  3. Select Backup from the menu.
  4. Select New Manual Backup.
  5. From the Company dropdown, select the company you want to manually backup.
  6. From the Backup Type dropdown ▼, select Full, Incremental, or Complete. Note: The Incremental option only saves changes since your last backup. Full saves your financial data. The "Complete" option saves everything, including your company data.
  7. Select Request Backup.

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Save your backups to Dropbox or Google Drive

Connect your Google Drive or Dropbox account

  1. Sign in to the QuickBooks Online Advanced company you want to back up, as an admin.
  2. Go to Settings ⚙ and then select Back up company.
    • Note: You might need to sign in with Intuit account to proceed.
  3. Select Local Backup.
  4. Select Link a Service.
  5. Select Link Dropbox or Link Google Drive.
  6. Follow the steps to allow QuickBooks to create the backups.

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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. Sign in to the QuickBooks Online Advanced company you want to restore, as an admin.
  2. Go to Settings ⚙ and select Back up company.
    • Note: You might need to sign in with Intuit account to proceed.
  3. Select Restore, then select New Restore.
  4. From the Select the company dropdown▼, select the company you want to overwrite and restore accounting data to.
  5. From the Date field, select the date you want to restore to.
  6. From the Time dropdown ▼, select the time you want to restore to.
  7. Enter "AGREE" in the Ready to restore your backup? field.
  8. Select Next. If you see a list of recommended actions, follow them first. After you finish everything on the list, select Check again.
  9. 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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