Backup & Restore
Everyone should backup their information regularly, say every week. It's important because if something goes wrong with your Mac such as a disk drive failure, you could lose all the information you've ever entered into Easy Books.
Automatic Backup
We know it's easy to forget to backup. We've developed a service that can help. It provides continuous online backup and synchronisation of your accounts between Macs and Easy Books for iOS running on iPads and iPhones. We call it Easy Books Sync. Should disaster happen, it's good to know you have a copy of your business accounts online. You can try out the service for two weeks for free. If you like using the service, there is a six-monthly charge, which you can pay by credit card.
Manual Backup
Making a manual backup of your business data is easy. You can run a backup manually and store the backup file somewhere safe, preferably also off-site. When you later want to restore the backup, just double-click the backup file to open it on your Mac. The backup file format is the same as used on Easy Books for iOS, running on the iPhone and iPad. You can restore a backup from your Mac by sending the file to yourself as an email attachment. This will restore on your iPad easily, and of course you can do the reverse too and restore backups you've made on your iPad to your Mac.
To create a new backup, use the main application menu. Click on Businesses > Backup....
The backup system exports the database as an attachment with the file extension "easybooks_backup". When Easy Books is available on an iPad or iPhone, the mail app can pass this file easily to the Easy Books to restore the data on the device. To restore the backup file on your Mac, simply double-click it to open it.
When producing the backup, you pick which of your businesses you want to include in the backup. Backing up individual businesses is useful if you want to send a copy to a business partner without sending any other businesses or personal accounts.
It is considered best practice to create three copies of your data. One is stored in the app. A backup copy should be stored on a USB key and a third copy should be stored off-site such as in a Dropbox folder, or emailed to a GMail account.
Manual Restore
You can restore direct from the backup file by simply double-clicking on it. Alternatively you can use the Restore option from the Businesses menu.
The backup file is opened and the businesses contained in it are listed. You can choose to restore any or all of the businesses contained in the backup. The app will show which businesses will overwrite your local copy separately from those that will be added.
To go ahead with the restore, tap "Restore". If you are worried about overwriting an existing system, you can always produce a backup first, which will give you the option to restore later if you need to.