Backing up Payroll and MultiLedger data is one of the most important things you can do. To protect against the loss of your data, you need to make regular backups. For Payroll, you should make a backup after each pay date. For MultiLedger, you should make a backup at least once a week, but if you do a lot of transactions, you might want to backup daily.

The backup data includes everything associated with the current company except the application and any pdf/pict or meta files you use. All the data files for each company are compressed into a single “zip” backup file.

Attention MultiLedger/Payroll cross-platform users: MultiLedger and/or Payroll backups can be restored on either a Windows or a Macintosh computer.

Please note that “.zip” files are different from ZIP drives or disks. “.zip” is a compression technology and ZIP drives and disks are storage media.

1. Choose Backup Company from the File menu.If Backup Company is dimmed, your company files are not open. Open the company files you wish to back up and try again.
   
   

2. Choose where you want to save the backup archive in the dialog box that appears.

Be sure to pay attention to where you save the backup. You may want to change the folder using the pull-down menu, icons on the left of the dialog box and list below. You can save the backup archive anywhere, such as on another hard drive, a USB flash drive or another external media source.

Note: While it’s a good idea to store backups on external media (in case of a hard drive crash), you could also make a folder named “Backups” in your Documents folder and store all your backups there. That way they will be easy to find when you want to restore one.

Simply locate the Documents folder (if necessary), then click the New Folder icon. (WIN) or MAC) Name the new folder Backups, then click Open. The “.zip” backup will be saved in the new folder you just created.

3. Change the name of the backup archive if necessary at the bottom in “File name”(Windows) or at the top in “Save As”.

The default name for the archive is the letter “m” (for MultiLedger) or “p” (for Payroll), the first three characters of your company file name, followed by the current date (from your system settings) and the suffix “.zip.”

4. Click Save.

 

When the backup is complete you will get a backup complete message. To verify that the backup is “good”, restore the “zip” file backup to another location on your computer.

WARNING: If you try to double click the “.zip” file to open, you will most likely get the message that it can’t find an application to open. The files must be restored using the “Restore Backup” command before they can be opened. Check out the Restoring Company Files tech note or view the Tutorial for more information.