So you are getting a fatal error in QuickBooks…

* Error -6000
* QuickBooks reports “Connection to database lost”
* Your file is “not a QuickBooks data file, or is damaged…”
* Customers or vendors are missing or scrambled
* Your file fails one of these: Backup, restore, upgrade, verify, or rebuild

How can you repair these situations?

If you have a current backup made before the problem occured, you can simply restore your backup.

But if you don’t have a current backup, you still have options:

1. Run the Rebuild command on your company file (if you can open the file). Click File / Utilities / Rebuild Data. Some people claim that running the Rebuild command several times can fix problems that running it once cannot. I don’t know why that would be, but it wouldn’t hurt to try it if the first rebuild doesn’t solve your problems.

2. Create, and then restore, a portable file (File / Create Copy / Portable Company File) . This is a known fix for certain kinds of problems in the customer, vendor, or account lists. When you restore a portable file, it recreates some of the indexes in the file, and that can solve certain problems.

3. Run the Verify command (File / Utilities / Verify Data) and then examine the QBWIN.LOG file. To access the QBWIN.LOG file, open your QuickBooks company, press the F2 key, then press the F3 key. Click the Open File tab, select QBWIN.LOG, and click Open File. Scroll down towards the bottom of the log. See if you can locate the transactions that are causing it to fail. Edit or delete those problematic transactions if you can. This method doesn’t work as well in 2006+ versions of QuickBooks as pre-2006, but it still might be worth a try.

4. If the above don’t fix the problem, contact us at 1-800-999-9209 for guaranteed data repair services. In 95% of the cases, we can recover 100% of the data.

p.s. If we can’t repair the file either (which occasionally happens if the original file is full of garbage and there is no good TLG file), there is one last recourse: check with your CPA to see if they have a more recent good copy of your data than you do. Better to rekey two or three months’ worth of data than to have to start over from scratch.