QUICKBOOKS help

[TAXMAN]

I have a quickbooks client that brought me their usbdrive back up of the data. My version will not open her file up. They are upgraded to a newer one than most my other clients use. Question is backup is on USB labeled with the extension .QBM. Any one know if there is a way to extract the data in a usable manner from this backup. Most of my other clients are on other versions which I can change and give back. They can restore and move on. This is why I am reluctant to go to a higher version. Thanks all.

[ILLMAS]

Try restoring it as a portable file, and no you need the same version of QB or higher to open the file.  Since 2008 I buy the newest QB version each year because it never fails when a client upgrades to the latest version.

[Tracy Lee]

ILLMAS is correct.  I have worked in QB for 15 years and often have to backup and restore for clients.

[grandmabee]

On 10/20/2020 at 12:15 PM, TAXMAN said:

I have a quickbooks client that brought me their usbdrive back up of the data. My version will not open her file up. They are upgraded to a newer one than most my other clients use. Question is backup is on USB labeled with the extension .QBM. Any one know if there is a way to extract the data in a usable manner from this backup. Most of my other clients are on other versions which I can change and give back. They can restore and move on. This is why I am reluctant to go to a higher version. Thanks all.

You can have more than one version of QB on your computer.  I have about 6 that I still use for clients who have older versions and don't want to upgrade.  I try to only upgrade every other year if possible, but sometimes I have to get another one when a client comes in with a higher version than I do.

[Abby Normal]

4 hours ago, grandmabee said:

I have about 6

I just installed 2021 so I have 2012-2021 installed (10 years), but I rarely use below 2014 anymore.

And don't you wish Intuit would store the version in the file details so you'd know which version the file is from? At least the accountants copies have the version number in the filename.

 

[Catherine]

I have QB back to 2015 installed on my older computer, and (so far) just 2019 on the new computer.  I can download 2020 and 2021 any time I need them, but they're humongous files, so I won't bother until then.  I make notes in the client file about their version, but YES it would be nice if the file name itself showed the version!

[ILLMAS]

I still remember when QB had version 1, 2, 3 etc...  and in DOS

[Abby Normal]

2 hours ago, ILLMAS said:

I still remember when QB had version 1, 2, 3 etc...  and in DOS

Yep. I believe I remember QB not having a General Ledger report until version 3. It was then I concluded that they weren't consulting with accountants, and it still feels that way often when using QB and especially when setting up payroll for the first time. Seriously? One liability account and one expense account for EVERYTHING!! That's insane.

[Abby Normal]

4 hours ago, Catherine said:

they're humongous

How slow is your internet? I think it took a minute or two to download. They're less than a GB.

[Catherine]

18 hours ago, Abby Normal said:

How slow is your internet? I think it took a minute or two to download. They're less than a GB.

It's not the slow internet; it's hard drive space and the total lack of need for either of those two versions yet.  If I don't need a version clogging it up, I don't want it on the machine.  

[Abby Normal]

47 minutes ago, Catherine said:

It's not the slow internet; it's hard drive space and the total lack of need for either of those two versions yet.  If I don't need a version clogging it up, I don't want it on the machine.  

I see. [Checks my 3 TB drive and smiles.]

[Catherine]

3 hours ago, Abby Normal said:

[Checks my 3 TB drive and smiles.]

My husband warned that those extra-large drives are still subject to sudden failure.  So I have them for my onsite backup (two, mirrored) but not in my computer.

[Medlin Software, Dennis]

6 minutes ago, Catherine said:

My husband warned that those extra-large drives are still subject to sudden failure.  So I have them for my onsite backup (two, mirrored) but not in my computer.

Storage devices will fail shortly after start of service, or after many years of service, if they fail.  I don't trust new ones until about 90 days of use, and replace every 3 or 4 years.  Usual in service failures can be detected and managed by the drive's software, and you will not even notice.  In the old days, one would run a scanning program from time to time, which would move data from suspect areas, then mark those areas as bad (not to be used).  Likely still the case that all drives come with locked out bad areas, and those will gain over time, but not really affecting use or reliability.

The failures I see are human (hiring someone to "move" to a new computer, and they fail), power outages, and allowing some sort of nefarious item to cause problems.  Normal power on and off has some small amount of chance of causing issues.

[Catherine]

2 hours ago, Medlin Software said:

Normal power on and off has some small amount of chance of causing issues.

And yet, if you look at ratings and service life, the larger drives still have a higher failure rate than smaller ones.  It's getting better!  A few years ago the 1Tb drives were unreliable.  Now they are very reliable, and it's the 3-4Tb drives that have the higher failure rate.  As they get better with drive architecture, the size of reliable drives keeps creeping up.

[Abby Normal]

This particular drive is a hard drive, and it's almost 6 years old. All the other drives in the office are SSD's.

Just ran a SMART test on the old HD and got these results:

The overall fitness for this drive is 97%.
The overall performance for this drive is 97%.

Probably time to clone it to a new SSD, but it's all backed up as well. Plus it's not the OS drive and most of the data is not critical.

 

[TaxCPANY]

Last week I finally succeeded in cloning my main machine's five-year-old SSD to a new one -- after enduring 262 days of booting from a Rescue Disk.  A few bad sectors in the MBR *AND* the recovery partition stymied me and a Macrium technician for days.
ANYWAY, I'll need to add QB 2021 to my stable.  Can anyone recommend a discount source or should I hope that someone offers a Black Friday deal on it?

[ILLMAS]

Sign up for Enterprise membership with QB, you’ll get access to prior year QB, I renew it every year for two reason, one a client upgrades to the latest version, secondly I prepare payroll and the subscription is included.  This year price is $1,175.

[Lion EA]

Or, the QB ProAdvisor subscription gets every edition as it comes out. You do pay extra for payroll, though. Going into a couple of webinars now, so can't look up what I paid today.

[Catherine]

Yes, as QB ProAdvisor you get the new software available every year as part of the subscription.  You also get access to ALL version of the desktop that you can use yourself (including Enterprise, I believe), discounts on desktop or QBO subscriptions to offer to clients (at cost, keeping the extra for yourself, or at your cost, to make sure those clients don't revert to bad spreadsheets), "priority" support (that used to be better than it is now) and more.  There are free online courses on aspects of QB you are not as familiar with, and after taking specified sets of them you can be a certified QB advisor at different levels and listed as such on their own resources area.  That never brought me in any clients, so I only bother to take units of specific interest to me.