Many people ask—does QuickBooks Online backup automatically? QuickBooks Online users are often under the impression that Intuit will be able to restore any lost data if needed. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.
In the Intuit Community help documents, you can read that the answer to “Do I need to back up my data with QuickBooks Online” is no. However, this is followed by an important caveat that should not be overlooked: “we cannot restore your file to a previous point in time.”
What Intuit provides for QuickBooks Online users is a disaster recovery backup. If something were to happen to the QuickBooks Online platform or their servers, Intuit would try to recover everyone’s data to the last backup. We like to call this a platform-level backup.
As a user, you don’t have direct access to this QuickBooks Online backup to restore your data. This means that you risk having to manually undo changes or permanently lose data if:
· An app integration causes problems
· You need to undo a series of mistakes
· The client made changes without consulting you
· A disgruntled employee deleted data
· An item was deleted due to an honest mistake
· You were the victim of malware such as ransomware.
QuickBooks Online isn’t unique in this situation. If you look at most SaaS vendors (Xero, Shopify, BigCommerce, Trello, Zendesk, GitHub, etc.), users are responsible for backing up their account-level data under the Shared Responsibility Model.
This is why you need access to your account-level backups facebook database of QuickBooks Online, in addition to Intuit’s platform-level backups. It’s also the reason why we started Rewind since we identified this issue with so many cloud vendors.
The second reason why you want to enable QuickBooks Online backups yourself is to take control of your data. Especially when it comes to critical data such as finances, having a secondary backup in a different location from the cloud vendor’s servers gives you greater control and freedom.
If something were to happen to their QuickBooks Online files, even if it’s not your fault, the client will depend on you to help them recover their data. In that situation, you want to have the ability to help your client instead of waiting on Intuit to fix the situation.
How to Back Up and Restore QuickBooks Online With Rewind
Luckily, you don’t have to choose between the convenience of QuickBooks Online and the peace of mind of having a backup. With Rewind, you can automate a continuous backup of your QuickBooks Online account in just 5 minutes and never have to think about it again. That is until you need to restore the company file to the moment before it all went haywire.