Rebuilding a File That Won't Back Up Several readers have written to ask us about the "endless loop" they face when a company file has apparently become corrupted and won't back up (QuickBooks displays an error message saying that the file cannot be backed up). These readers report that when they called QuickBooks support, they were advised to rebuild the file. However, QuickBooks insists on performing a backup before rebuilding a file, and the backup fails, and the endless loop begins. You can rebuild a file without backing it up first with this undocumented trick: Hold the Ctrl key while you select File, Utilities, Rebuild. This opens the Rebuild feature without the accompanying insistence on backing up the file first. Rebuilding a file is a drastic step, and sometimes has side-effects, so you shouldn't use this feature unless a QuickBooks Knowledge Base article (on the QuickBooks Support Web pages) says that this is the solution you must use, or a QuickBooks support person has told you to rebuild the file (and has explained why in a way that makes sense to you -- it’s often not a good idea to follow the support crew's instructions blindly). Safety Steps Before Rebuilding a File Before you rebuild a file that won't back up, choose My Computer (or Computer in Vista) and copy the company file (the file with the .QBW extension) to a flash drive or burn it to a CD. That way, if the rebuild fails, you can at least open the file and print reports to have a record of your data. Then, if you have older backups, you can open an earlier (pre-corruption) backup, restore it, and enter the recent data. Note that this assumes you keep multiple backups, which is always a good idea. If you back up to a USB flash drive, or a folder on another computer on your network, create subfolders for each day of the week and backup to the appropriate folder. This means you can go back as far as six days to find a file that isn't corrupted. In addition, each week burn a CD of your company file to make sure you're protected in case the drive on which you're storing backups fails.