I’m just trying out Quickfile and so far so good. However, I’m a little confused about how to backup and restore data.
I’m used to backing up data on a daily basis (either incremental or full). I can see that I can create a weekly or monthly backup which appears to be a series of CSV files.
How do you restore the data from these files? Is this a manual process or can you use the import facility?
Is there an option (paid or otherwise) to create daily backups (either full or incremental)?
I really hope that the above is resolvable. Despite the excellent features within QF, without a robust backup/restore procedure in place I can’t see how any serious business would want to use QF for such critical data.
There is no automated restore facility, you would need to manually import the CSV files using the various import procedures. This is actually the same for all cloud based accounting systems and there’s a good technical reason why this is so, I’ve discussed this elsewhere but can’t find the post right now.
Also bear in mind that we already run full backups every 15 minutes internally as well as offsite backups every 24 hours. Our servers have very high levels of redundancy built in, this was part of the design from day 1 and we wouldn’t be in this business unless we could confidently provide users with such assurances.
Thanks for the response. I have no problem manually importing from the CSV files.
I know you run backups every 15 minutes but how do I as a user restore from this backup. Is it just a case of sending an email or is this purely for your own peace of mind so that you can restore all systems in the case that there is an issue at your data centre?
I know that some of the similar cloud based systems allow you to create a local backup (albeit in CSV format) at any point in time. I believe that this would be a useful addition to QF. I don’t think a weekly backup (from a user perspective) is sufficient, especially when you are new to the system and you are testing its functionality.
Anyway, I’ve been using the system over the past few days and I’m pretty pleased with it.
This is to protect our full dataset and can’t be used exclusively to restore a specific account. It’s intended as a disaster recovery procedure so that if there was some catastrophic failure of hardware (which due to the redundancies is a very unlikely scenario), only 15 mins of data would be lost across all accounts. The other data-loss scenario is “user error” which is where the account level CSV backups come in.
That’s what our current backup tool does, it produces a bunch of CSV files… although it’s not “on-demand”. We can run backups for users on-demand but only from our admin system. We will probably add the facility to allow users to run backups when they wish, in the mean time we’re happy to run this on any account if requested.