Following a system of making backups

It's important to follow a system of making and storing your backups properly so you're always covered in event of an emergency. Here are some suggestions for making backups:

• Make a backup each time you exit MYOB Accounting Plus. To make this easy to remember, mark the Prompt for Data Backup When Closing selection in the Security section of the Preferences window. Then, each time you exit Accounting Plus, an alert message will appear, asking whether you want to create a backup of your company file.

• Store your backups in places other than the hard disk where your company file exists. If that hard disk is damaged, a backup file could also become damaged. As soon as you make a backup, you should copy the backup to a storage device or to a network location.

• Keep multiple backups from different days or weeks. If, for example, you use Accounting Plus every day, you might keep five backups - one for each business day of the week. At the end of each day, you'd copy your backup onto the appropriate day's storage device.
  
  The next week, you'd copy Monday's backup onto the storage device that contained the previous Monday's backup, and so on. (Be sure to delete the previous week's backup from the storage device first.)
  
  You might decide to follow another routine - say, keeping 10 backups and reusing the storage space for them every other week, instead of every week. The important thing is to develop a regular routine and to follow through with it. This will ensure that you'll always have a reliable backup from a recent time period.

• After you've made all entries for an accounting period - which typically happens a few days into the next accounting period - make an official "end-of-the-month" backup and store it in a safe place. We suggest you label this backup clearly with the name of the month. At the end of the 12-month financial year, you should have 12 monthly backups.

• As a safety measure, you should periodically restore your backup and open the restored company file. This will ensure that the backups you're creating will be usable if you ever need them.
  
  Backups sometimes fail when they're restored. These failures can be traced to problems with the backup media (disks, tape cartridges and the like), including exposure to magnetism, excessive heat or moisture. Rarely, problems with your computer's hard disk can damage Accounting Plus itself so that the Restore programme no longer works properly.
  
  In addition, restoring a backup can help to identify errors you may have made in the backup process and fix them.

Step by step

• To make a backup

Related topics

• Additional facts about making backups