Backups in Microsoft Money 2006

See this article for information about backups in Microsoft Money 2005 and earlier, and how I handle it. Some general comments about backups can be found in Article 199.

Microsoft Money creates a backup on *exiting* the program, which means that if you close a file with some corruption, it is carried forward into the backup. In earlier versions, this can be a huge problem as there was no history maintained of backup files - therefore if you just relied on this one backup, you could quite easily end up without a working backup file.

It is still important to ensure that you maintain backups away from your main hard drive (such as a USB drive or external hard disk), as if the local disk fails, then you would be just as stuck as having no backups at all. However, Money 2006 provided some additional options for backup, thanks to some feedback from MVPs Article 7 and wishes sent to the product group.

What's new in MS Money 2006

The main changes are twofold.

1. Microsoft Money now supports CD, DVD and Network backups
2. Microsoft Money 2006 will create multiple backup files.

With regards the multiple backup files, you can have between 1 and 99 of these, and they are timestamped with the date and time. The new backup settings page can be seen below. Note the dropdown lists with the 'keep only the X most recent backup files' - when the limit is reached, older backups are removed.



Note also that the scheduled backups in the lower box is a directory location. You can still use a device such as a floppy or a USB drive - which is still useful as a means of keeping your data off the machine in an additional safe, but you could use any path, so a network directory can be used, for example, "\\some network directory\money backups"

Microsoft Money 2006 Filename format

The file names when using the new Microsoft Money backup options are saved in the following way:

Filename Backup_year_month_date_time.MBF

This is illustrated in the screen shot below, which shows three backup files. Note that these have been stored in the same directory as the Money files.



For further information on Money 2006, see the following links:

• System Requirements
• Product Pages
• Features
• MS Money 2006 Timeline

To repeat the comment at the start of this article: "It is still important to ensure that you maintain backups away from your main hard drive (such as a USB drive or external hard disk), as if the local disk fails, then you would be just as stuck as having no backups at all"