Quickbooks 2016 ...can i run from external hard drive onto another computer?

Question

Main computer wont boot and it has Quickbook installed. So pulled that drive hooked up to USB on another computer so it shows in "my computer' as another drive (F). Now if i go into the (external drive "F") i can start Quickbooks up but my question is......i have Quickbooks also on the Computer i got the external drive hooked to, so i have Quickbooks on the computer and well as Quickbooks on the External drive.....i just happened to have two computers with quickbooks but the one wont boot so i hooked to the other computer via USB data cables! So if i run Quickbooks from the external drive will i be able to run it with the data on the (external drive) or how will that work. I am not sure how to just load Quickbooks from my computer and import data from the external drive. It would be nice if i open the external drive Quickbooks and be able to just load data from the external drive...IS THAT POSSIBLE??? Any advice would be helpful thanks in advance!!

Answer 1

quickbooks saves your records on a database(a single quickbooks project file) thus you can open that file with any computer anywhere so long as it has a quickbooks version that understand your database file version. so you cant use a very old version of quickbooks on it. you also cant run a windows program that is on an external drive becuase all the separate registered bits are part of the OS that you HAVE NOT BOOTED and are NOT PART OF THE OS that you have booted(although in this simple case since you have another copy of quickbooks on the OS you have booted it will be able to open your quickbooks project succesfully. so you can keep a copy of your quickbooks project on a usb stick if you like. Just remember you will get confused if you have too many copies of your stuff and only 1 of them is the CURRENT UP TO DATE ONE. which is why QB offers backup to the cloud, and presumably you dont actually need the quickbooks program to access that copy.

Answer 2

You should be able to open the data files on the USB drive from the second computer. You can't actually run the copy of Quickbooks on the USB drive directly unless it was installed that way on the second computer, due to how Windows files are installed all over creation.



It's been a long time since I used Quickbooks (I used to be a beta tester for Intuit) but I seem to remember you can open a data set from the file menu, meaning you should be able to open the data set on the second computer, then close it and open the data set from the USB drive. Or it may have lost that ability... again it's been a while.

Answer 3

I might have Quickbooks Pro i can't remember for sure!