I use Quicken 2005 Deluxe. For years I have been backing up to a zip, but I recently installed a second hard drive and had to get rid of my zip drive. Rather than using an external zip drive, I am now backing up to a hard drive that I use only for backups. To be safe I suppose I should also backup to a CD.
I am only keeping one backup copy, writing over it each time I perform the manual backup, which is almost every day. But now I am wondering if I should be dating my backups and keeping several days worth. (I do keep five versions of the automatic backup.)
What is the advantage of dating my backups and why would I need more than one version?
I'm in the school that says backups are way too much work. I've used Quicken for over 15 years, and backup once a month, if that.
Only you can decide which backup frequency is worth the effort, but even if I have to recreate everything since my last backup, I'll still be time ahead of all I've saved not doing any.
There are two basic reasons for keeping backups: to recover from software/user-error type problems, and to recover from hardware/theft problems.
If there was no possibility of hardware/theft problems, you'd need no offline backups, you could just keep as many backups as you like on your hard drive. But since we know that drives can fail, fires can consume pc's, and thieves can steal pc's; we make sure we keep decent backups offline.
But the most likely need for a backup is to recover from the first type of problem: software/user-error.
As for how many backups you keep, and for how long; I see two considerations. The obvious one is how much tolerance do you have for bringing a backup up to date. The more difficult it would be to bring a backup up to date (how much manual effort would be involved in getting missing transactions entered correctly), the more backups you should keep.
The other consideration, that some people forget about, is that data corruption (caused by you or the software) may not be noticed immediately. If you kept only one backup, it could have corruption that you had not yet detected: when you detect corruption in your current file, and hope to fix it by restoring your backup ... the backup may have the same problem. There is no way to know for certain how long after you get corruption you will notice it. The more backups you have, the more likely you are to be able to find one with good data. If you only have six month's worth of data all told, it may not matter much; but if you have ten years worth of data, and your current file and your only backup are unusable ... you have lost ten years worth of data ... even if the only usable backup you had was a two year old backup, that would be much better than no backup.
I don't use dated backup files; I control my backups by the names of the folders where I save them. But the principles are the same.
Others have explained the need for multiple dated back ups. In addition to that, All my data (including backups) gets deposited on my Data partition. The back ups will get copied to different drives and once a week or so, I use Acronis T.I. to image my Data partition, which is kept on it's own partition (Acronis Images) and (about bi-monthly or monthly) gets burned to DVD.
I've not often needed those back ups, but when I have, it's been worth every minute of effort. I also use T.I. to image my system drive about once a week, which has been a lifesaver on multiple occasions. One can never have enough back ups.
I use the Quicken online backup. It's $9.00 per year and automatically keeps multiple copies. I have it set to auto back up each night. If disaster ever struck, this would be one less thing to worry about. I've had to restore on more than one occasion, so the annual feel has been well worth it for me.
I have written a script in Python that meets the following =====================================================REQUIREMENTS: 1) Read in all file names from Quicken backup directory. 2) Produce a list of all Quicken backup file names with date. 3) Keep all: a) Backup files created within the last 38 days. b) Month-end backup files for last 18 months. c) Year-end backup files for last 10 years. NOTE: If MQBUDF finds no backups in the last 38 days then MQBUDF will revise options file "options.jsc" to show a keep date that will be equal to the most recent backup set. 4) Delete all other Quicken backup files (by request only). 5) ONLY Quicken backup files can be in the Quicken backup directory. 6) Quicken backups must be created within +/- 7 days of each month-end. 7) Quicken backup file names must be in the following format: Name_yyyymmdd.ext. 8) "Python MQBUDF.PY" command-line options are as follows: a) /? Outputs the command-line options syntax, i.e., "Python MQBUDF.py /?". b) /D Dumps Quicken backup directory information into a tab delimited text file "QDump.txt". c) Drive:\Path to Quicken backup files, e.g., G:\QUICKEN\BACKUP. 9) Place backup file names that can be deleted into file DQfiles.txt for viewing. Requires a procedure when file DQfiles.txt gets too large that it will remove the first few records. Maximum file size should be about 48K, i.e., about 1,000 records or 140 backup days. 10) Have a file called options.jsc set the default path and/or numeric digits however, the command-line option will override this default path. Also, keep special backup file dates, that are not the regular keep dates, in this options.jsc file, e.g., "Keep:
20050615". Plus set AutoDelete to Yes, in order to automatically delete the non-keep backup files, e.g., AutoDelete: Yes. However, if using command-line arguments then turn off AutoDelete. =====================================================If anyone is interested please contact me.
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