Account management

I usually enjoy popcorn with drama.

I am setting up QuickBooks for the first time, and I am going to approach this from a simplified Business Continuity, Disaster Recovery, and Software Architecture perspective by asking the following questions:

1. What are the consequences to my business from disruption if I am unable to do bookkeeping or I have a full or partial data loss?   
2. What are potential loss scenarios, i.e., crashed hard drive, PC meltdown, fire, flood, tornado, hurricane, long term power outage, or phone wires cut by construction equipment?
3. How soon do I need to restore my ability to do the books if I lose my PC or hard drive that hosts the DB?  The measurement is called the Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
4. How much data am I willing to lose if my hard drive that hosts the DB crashes?  The measurement is called the Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
5. Is my datafile small enough, and my Internet connection large enough, to handle frequent syncing to the cloud? The measurement is called available bandwidth.
6. How much money am I willing to spend to assure recovery?
7. Do I expect to have more than a single user or multiple geographic user locations?

Losing access to my account tool for 24 hours or losing more than an hour of data I have entered is a business impact of CRITICAL.  My answers reflect an RTO of 24 hours and  RPO of 1 hour, meaning that if I lose my PC or hard drive, it is acceptable to have a 24-hour outage with the possibility of losing up to an hour of data.  Additionally, I will have three users from a single home location. If my Internet syncing impacts others in the house, I can do the books later, or they can stream their movie at a later time. 

Intuit describes cloud backup as an appropriate solution within a business continuity strategy here: https://quickbooks.intuit.com/r/hr-and-management/create-emergency-preparation-checklist-business/ and here: https://security.intuit.com/index.php/protect-your-computer/back-up-your-files and here: https://security.intuit.com/index.php/home/blog/760-don-t-forget-to-back-up-your-data-on-world-backu....  

 Given this business impact analysis and available solutions, I need a recovery strategy that is within my budget and my tolerance for downtime and data loss.  Here are my options:

1. Use QuickBooks Online for $10-$20 per month for one user or $20-$40 per month for three users. I hope and pray that the Intuit RPO and RTO support my needs.  I have not been able to find an uptime status for these services, like many other cloud providers share, ex: https://status.docusign.com/.
2. Use QuickBooks Pro Desktop menu item to setup / activate online backup $9.95 per month or $99.95 per year.
3. Manually backup files with QuickBooks Pro Desktop by choosing menu item Backup Company, then Create Local Backup, and select a OneDrive folder. Manual backup creates the risk that if you forget to backup, you will lose all of the data since the last backup in the event of a disaster.
4. Sync to the default Intuit folder on the local hard drive to OneDrive. Sync setup is only necessary on the PC that hosts the Database Manager.  Sync backup creates the risk that if your sync is failing for some reason without your knowledge, you will lose all of the data since the last successful sync in the event of a disaster.

I have decided that the best decision for me personally is to use QuickBooks Pro Desktop with the OneDrive sync option.  I have multiple users in a single location, and so I will run the QuickBooks Database Server Manager on a desktop configured for multi-user.   I will connect to this database with a laptop occasionally. 

My OneDrive is part of my Office 365 OneDrive for Busines Plan 1, which is $5/month (today) and provides 1 TB of OneDrive storage and supports files up to 15 GB in size.   I don’t expect my database to be larger than 15GB.

To connect my local QuickBooks default folder to sync with OneDrive, I execute the following at the Windows command prompt: 

mklink /j "%UserProfile%\OneDrive\Intuit" "C:\Users\Public\Documents\Intuit"

I can now use Windows Explorer to see a folder called Inuit in my OneDrive folder that has an arrow in the bottom left showing this is a link to another folder.  If I check OneDrive, it shows all of the files synced except two that were in use: 1) CompanyName.qbw.TLG and CompanyName.qbw.  Once I close QuickBooks Desktop Pro, I see those files were stored to OneDrive as well.  Please note, until all files have synced, your data is not reliably backed up to the cloud.  If you have a 1 hour RPO, as described above, you will need to close QuickBooks Pro Desktop each hour to ensure backup to the cloud. 

I discussed four options above that have different recovery characteristics, where the final option was to use OneDrive.  Recovery using the first option of Online is out of the scope of this article. The last three options require that someone regularly verify that the files are backed up.  I like to use recurring calendar reminders for this.  The last three options also require a regular recovery test.  You should assign a person(s) to do this, and provide the written steps to recover and test these steps regularly to make sure that your recovery plan works.  For example, using option 4, you could:

• On the Original PC with Database Manager:
  • Copy the OneDrive folder named Intuit to a USB stick and another location that you can restore from if your test corrupted your database
  • If you are performing a real recovery, copy this folder to at least one other location before you do anything else
  • Close QuickBooks Pro Desktop
• On the Recovery PC :
• Install QuickBooks Pro Desktop with the database manager
• Close QuickBooks Pro Desktop
• DO NOT SETUP ONEDRIVE AND SYNC ON THE RECOVERY PC if you are only testing recovery. If you are performing a recovery, then you need to set this up, but only after making multiple copies of your OneDrive Intuit folder.
• Rename or Delete the C:\Users\Public\Documents\Intuit folder on your recovery PC and replace with the Intuit folder on the USB stick in the first step.
• Start QuickBooks and make sure that all of your data and configurations are still active. If there is a problem, Intuit support should have multiple scenarios to help since we didn’t just backup the database, but we also backed up the data needed for Auto Data Recovery.

Finally, if your building burns down, where are you going to get the written recovery steps and the software.  My software is in Amazon Downloads, OneDrive stores my recovery steps, and my sometimes defective brain stores my OneDrive password.

I hope this helps prevent the enormous heartbreak of not being prepared to continue accounting operations in the event of a disaster.

Jeff Mikkelson (CISA, CISSP, TOGAF, PMP, CEH, MCSE, MCSD, MCT)

https://linkedin.com/in/jeffmikkelsonmn/