Restoring Microsoft Office Small Business Accounting Express company files….

So you’ve wiped your laptop, installed Windows 7, or whatever… but you forgot to backup your MS SBA company file. 

That’s easy to do since it only reminds you to back up the file when OPENING it, NOT while closing it when it makes the most sense (like, after you’ve made the changes, ahem… good one, MS) 

Well your last .sbb (backup file) is too old because you made numerous new customers and invoices and such since the last time you opened it, so whadda ya do?  Well, you might want to restore the backup you do have first, if you have one, and then you’ll probably think to restore the .sbc file from My DocumentsMicrosoft Small Business, right?  WRONG!  Notice the file size on the .sbc?  Turns out this is only a shortcut to the actual company file. Replacing the .sbc file *may* (depending on several factors) result in a message that the company file was created on another machine and cannot be opened on this machine.  Well, it didn’t have your data anyway…

Ok, remember seeing MS SQL being installed along with SBA?  A quick peek in the SQL server config mgr > MSSMLBIZ will probably show the data path as c:Program FilesMicrosoft SQL ServerMSSQL.1MSSQL or something similar.  The MSSQL.1 may be a .2 or whatever. 

Now to fix:

1. On your old machine or backup image or WHS backup in my case, drill down to this path, checking each MSSQL.x dir to find and copy the two files with your company file name (same name the .sbc was.)  (Optional?  I dunno, but copy the certificate files too, just in case.)  LEAVE the rest of the files here!  If you copy them all you might not get the MSSMLBIZ SQL instance to start again on your new machine. 
2. (required?)  Stop the MSSMLBIZ SQL instance via services.msc or the SQL surface area config. 
3. drill down to c:Program FilesMicrosoft SQL ServerMSSQL.1MSSQL on the new machine, replacing the MSSQL.1 with where-ever you are found your company file restored to (or if you didn’t restore an old .sbb, go to where the data path points to in SQL server config mgr > MSSMLBIZ) and paste the two company files and any certificate files copied from the old machine. 
4. start the MSSMLBIZ SQL instance if you had previously shut it down, fire up MS SBA, in my case Express 2009 (although the concept should apply to Pro and also to earlier versions,) and voila! 

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!  Did ya have any custom invoice, email, or other templates?  On XP these will be located in %allusersprofile%TemplatesOffice Accounting 2009 … on Vista or Windows 7 they are (or should go to) ProgramDataMicrosoftWindowsTemplatesOffice Accounting 2009 … go ahead, copy the entire dir and paste in the new install. 

NOTE:  despite all this, I still noticed a few transactions it seemed to forget I already received payment for.  As concerned as I should be, everything else looks ok so I gotta call this one close enough to fixed.