If you use quickbooks you obviously need to make sure that important data is backed up. No big deal if it is just one person. What if there are many? Quickbooks built-in backup utility unfortunately will not let you backup the company file if there are users logged on. And with many users it really isn’t feasible to expect everyone to log off every day, not to mention if you want to make backup copies throughout the day

Fortunately if your company file resides on a server there is a way to do it. First of all built-in Windows Server Backup will backup a company file just fine while users are in it. I have tested that many times and consistently got good results. Now let’s talk about additional backups. Say you are using QuickBooks Enterprise and want to make a copy every 3 hours as losing even one day of work would be a lot. It is really unreasonable to have everyone logoff throughout the day. And a drawback of Windows Server Backup is that you can’t create multiple scheduled tasks in the GUI. You can, however, use the command-line version.

Simple exampe:

wbadmin start backup -backuptarget:\\<servername>\qbbck -include:”<company file>.qbw”,”<company file>.qbw.tlg” -user:<username> -password:<password> -vssCopy -quiet

Notes on this:

-When I tried to backup to another server it failed, logged an error saying “volume not ready”. Don’t know how it is not ready. It will not backup to a drive letter, says “invalid backup location”. So what I did I shared the desired backup folder and pointed the server back to itself via UNC path

– Had to put in the -quiet switch, otherwise Windows Server Backup says the backup at this location cannot be secured and asks for confirmation which defeats the automation purpose.

Windows Server Backup creates a folder structure and a lot of files. What I do next is use xcopy command to copy it to another server. Simple example:

xcopy “<backup folder location>\*.*” \\<server name>\<share name>  /s /r /h /y /z

It will copy directly to a UNC path, you may have to play with command-line switches to get it 100% right.

Of course you have to test this very thoroughly. Windows server backup basically puts what it backs up into a vhdx file. You can mount the vhdx file, extract company file from it and see if you can logon to it, look for recent transactions and run company file validation. The same would be highly recommended on the network copy to make sure files don’t get corrupted during copy.