Your company’s financial data is a critical record of your fiscal history and is crucial for protecting your business continuity. Yet many times, not enough importance is put on protecting that data.

One easy step is to complete regular data backups which are easy to do and can save you great amounts of time as well as ensure that your data is secure.

We recommend you back up your Sage BusinessWorks Accounting data on a regular basis, daily if possible. We also recommend performing additional backups when:

  • Rebuilding data files.
  • Closing the month and year.
  • Importing data.
  • End of the payroll year, before your December close. In addition to creating a backup of the database, you can create a year-end archive copy of the database for reference purposes. Here’s how to create an archive copy:

1.  Have all users exit the company.

2.  On the main Sage BusinessWorks menu, click Utilities, and then click Maintain Companies.

3.  Click OK at the exclusive option message.

4.  Click on the Lookup button to select the Company ID; click Accept.

5.  Click the Copy button.

6.  Enter a new Company ID (for example, PAY2011), and click OK.

While it is extremely important that you back up your data on a regular basis, testing the files to ensure you understand how to restore the data files and to test that the data restores successfully are just as important.

Make sure you can restore a backup to a new company ID and the restored data looks correct. If you are backing up to media such as a tape or a CD, this process will test to make sure the files can be accessed and that you can restore the backup. Mini tutorials are available on the Sage Online support page at www.sagesoftwareonline.com. To view, search the term “tutorial” in the BusinessWorks Knowledgebase located in the Support area.

When performing data restores, make sure you allow enough time for the restore process to complete. You should receive a confirmation at the end of the restore function: “The restore operation was completed successfully. Would you like to restore another database?” Confirm your data is okay before continuing.

To test the contents of the database after the restore, run reports that you ran before the restore to confirm the information matches.

For more information or assistance with your Sage BusinessWorks backup, contact Mary Hildinger, Systems Consultant at info@dwdtechgroup.com.

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