If the computer that houses your QuickBooks data crashes, what should you do?

When a computer that contains your QuickBooks data experiences a crash, the primary and most effective course of action is to restore a backup copy of your company file. This approach allows you to recover your financial data to the most recent point prior to the crash, minimizing data loss and ensuring continuity in your business operations.

Restoring from a backup is essential because it enables you to access possibly weeks or months of work that were saved up to the last backup. Regularly making backups is a good practice, so having a recent backup file available will allow for a quick recovery process. This action is a critical step in data recovery protocols, as it provides a direct method to access and restore vital financial information that could be lost otherwise.

Creating a backup copy should ideally be done routinely to avoid data loss but is not useful after a crash has occurred, as the question's scenario implies that the system is already compromised. Condensing company file data pertains to optimizing the size of the file and does not address immediate recovery efforts. Exporting data to Excel is a useful feature for manipulating and analyzing data, but it does not serve as a method for recovering data after a system failure. Therefore, restoring a backed-up copy is the correct and most actionable response to recover from