What Damaged my QuickBooks Data File?

by Lynnea Bylund on October 28, 2010 · 3 comments

certified quickbooks bookkeeping for small businesses in orange county and san diegoWe have encountered many corrupted QuickBooks data files over the years and we are often asked “How did this happen?” It happens. Among the most common causes of QuickBooks data damage include Network glitches. You are using QuickBooks across a network in multiuser mode. One of the workstations loses connection with the server for a moment and then reestablishes connection. During the disconnecting and reconnecting, the data stream gets changed a bit, and then sometimes the database gets corrupted.

QuickBooks recovery pro Shannon Tucker last week described several additional ways your file can wig out. Shannon is the Support Director for AccountingUsers, Inc. and has been involved in accounting database consulting for over twenty years.

Additional data file corruption can occur, according to Shannon, from –

Performance bottlenecks. If your QuickBooks data file is huge and you have a lot of people in QuickBooks at the same time and your computers are old, QuickBooks is not going to be able to keep up with all the read and write requests to the database. The file will get damaged at some point.

Power blips. If the power momentarily goes out in your office, it can change data and corrupt the QuickBooks database. Most users have their server protected with battery backups, but many don’t protect their desk computers or network routers with battery backups. Uninterruptable Power Supplies (battery backups) are cheap insurance.

Disk crashes. Hard drives have moving parts, and like any mechanical device, they will fail at some point. If the only copies of your data are on your hard drive, that’s a recipe for disaster.

Bad software. Malware, spyware, viruses, worms, trojans…if your computer gets sick, it can affect QuickBooks and other applications you depend on.

User error. Just kidding! Users can’t really trash or crash their database unless they do something silly like unplugging the power or a network cable while QuickBooks is running. You can’t mess up the internal structures of the database by doing normal processes within QuickBooks itself.

To prevent data corruption in QuickBooks, you basically want to do whatever you can so that QuickBooks can read and write to its database quickly and without any interruptions. You also want to regularly backup your data to a location OFF your hard drive.

{ 3 comments }

1 Quick Draw McGraw August 11, 2011 at 4:45 pm

Perfect, big thanks – our QuickBooks file is fixed! Very appreciative.

2 Pauly August 24, 2011 at 8:54 am

All of the mystery surrounding our crashed QB file has now been removed. Thanks!

3 Smokeless Joe October 24, 2011 at 7:03 pm

Thank you for this post – our QuickBooks data has been restored!

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