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Back up and restore your QuickBooks Online Advanced Company

SOLVED•by QuickBooks•558•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 vendors, customers, settings, and other data if you need to. Here’s how.

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 memos 
• Vendor credits 
• Journal entries 
• Purchases and purchase orders 
• Refund receipts 
• Time activities 
• Transfers		• Accounts 
• Budgets 
• Classes
• Currencies 
• Customers
• Departments 
• Employees (except their SSN) 
• Items 
• Payment methods 
• Tax agencies 
• Tax codes and tax rates 
• Terms
• Vendors (except the Tax fields)		• Attachments
• Company Info 
• Entitlements 
• Exchange rates 
• Preferences 
• Intuit Payroll info backs up as journal entries 
• Inventory shrinkage and adjustments back up as journal entries






  • 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

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 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.

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, then select Authorize to proceed.

Turn off automatic backup

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

  1. Go to Settings ⚙.
  2. Select Back up company.
    Note: You might need to sign in with Intuit account, then select Authorize to proceed.
  3. Find the company with the automatic backup you want to turn off.
  4. Select the Action ▼ dropdown menu, then select Disable backup.

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 ⚙.
  2. Select Back up company.
    Note: You might need to sign in with Intuit account, then select Authorize to proceed.
  3. Select Add Company.
  4. Select the Search for a company ▼ dropdown menu, then select the company you want to back up.
  5. Select Next, then Connect.
    Note: If you have multiple companies to back up, repeat steps 2 to 4. 
  6. Find the company you want to back up.
  7. Select the Action ▼ dropdown menu, then select Run full backup.

Save your backups to Dropbox or Google Drive

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

Connect your Google Drive or Dropbox account

  1. Go to Settings ⚙.
  2. Select Back up company.
    Note: You might need to sign in with Intuit account, then select Authorize to proceed.
  3. Select the User menu.
  4. Select where you want to save your back up. Select Link Google Drive or Link Dropbox.
  5. 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 Local Backup cannot be restored using Online BackUp and Restore at this time.

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 checkmark in the status. That’s when it’s safe to go back and use your company.

  1. Go to Settings ⚙, then select Back up company.
    Note: You might need to sign in with Intuit account, then select Authorize to proceed.
  2. Find the company you want to restore a back of.
  3. From the Action ▼ dropdown menu, select Restore.
  4. From the Date field, select the date you want to restore.
  5. From the Time ▼ dropdown menu, select the time you want to restore.
  6. From the Ready to restore your backup? section, enter "AGREE".
  7. Select Next. If you see a list of recommended actions, follow them first. After you finish everything on the list, select Refresh to continue.
  8. Select Start Restore.

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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