QuickBooks has an impressive market share with our customers – Small and Medium Enterprises – worldwide and within Nerds On Site we applaud their leadership in making the financial management part of a business understandable by us non-accountants.
But, if you’ve used QuickBooks any length of time or support customers that do, you are afraid of a screen that looks like this (screenshot thanks to @jtrainer):
We encounter corrupt QuickBooks data way too often, and we have on several occasions requested QuickBooks to provide us with API access to the backup system so that we can apply more intelligent backup strategies outside of QuickBooks.
QuickBooks has a built-in backup feature that backs up its files that end in .QBW to files that end in .QBB. In many instances, both files are corrupted and have been corrupted for many backup revisions. In such instances, only QuickBooks themselves can repair the files. Due to the proprietary nature of QuickBooks databases, third parties are not able to do this effectively.
In addition, QuickBooks fees range from $250-$750 for repairs, so it appears from an outside perspective, that there’s a huge problem here:
Fact #1: no outside software can monitor and initiate backups, never mind hot-backups (backups while the software is in use)
Fact #2: QuickBooks has a significant revenue stream (in some cases more than the licensed software itself) in data recovery services
Clearly there is no motive for QuickBooks to do things differently. So, if you have had problems with QuickBooks data, please comment here and message them on twitter.com/quickbooks and let’s build some predictability with this great piece of accounting software!
Thank you for listening, QuickBooks (if you are).
Privacy Shock! Computer Repair Stores Snooping Your Computer.
A new study by the University of Guelph has shown that 50% of the computer shops violated your privacy when using a...
