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Today I had a slight crisis…I had to reinstall QuickBooks 2006 on a new computer and restore the backup file that QuickBooks creates with the “.qbb” extension.

Everything worked great, and it was literally as simple as popping in the QuickBooks CD, installing the software, launching the program, and then following the steps from the “File->Restore menu”.

However, once I went into the Loan Manager to make a loan payment, I discovered none of the loans that I setup were there. I learned the hard way that the Loan Manager data is not backed up with your QuickBooks backup file. I really did not want to re-key in my loans, figure out what payment number I was on, determine principal and interest components, etc…Needless to say I was a little sad and looked for a way to get my Loan Manager data back.

Well, it turns out that I got lucky. Along with my QuickBooks backups, I do full system backups using Microsoft Backup to an external hard disk. What I found out is that I needed to go to my backup and restore the file that ends in the .lmr extension in the C:\Program Files\Intuit\QuickBooks 2006.

Once I restored the file, and overwrote the one that was in there (I still don’t know if it was there from when I installed QuickBooks, or if it got created when I first opened the Loan Manager and had a mini heart attack), everything worked! Before I restored the file I made sure I closed QuickBooks, restored the file, and lastly I restarted QuickBooks. Going to the “Banking->Loan Manager” menu option then displayed all of my loans and let me get on with paying my bills.

After having this crisis I looked through QuickBooks for any other features that were not working. Everything else seemed to be there except for the logo on the customer statement document. I restored the directory whose name ends in - Images and then my statement started displaying the company logo again. The directory will be named Your Company Name – Images, where “Your Company Name” is replaced by your company name as QuickBooks knows it. It is similar to the file name that is used for the backup file.

The moral of this story…QuickBooks backup is not a full backup. Be sure to use it in conjunction with a backup of your QuickBooks program file directory.