The start of a New Year is a good time to revisit the idea of safekeeping your important data. Sort of like using the change to/from Daylight Savings time to change your smoke alarm batteries, we can use the start of the New Year to review our backup procedures.
Part of your backup procedure with Timeslips should be to make a backup from within the software by clicking on File, Backup from the uppermost left corner of the program. (A successful backup requires that you be the ONLY person logged into the database at the time.) The result is a single file with a BKU extension. BKU extensions are pretty much unique to Timeslips, so if you have any BKU files on your computer, they are very likely Timeslips backups. On the flip side, if you are searching for a backup file on a machine, you can search for *.BKU to find them.
What’s sort of neat about the BKU file is that it is really a Zip file of all the various files that make up your database. A version 2012 database can have over 400 individual files that collectively make up the database. Attempting to backup all of the files separately, or even worse incrementally across multiple backup media, can be a HUGE pain to restore. Instead, make it a habit to make a BKU file at least once a week. Restoring the zipped BKU file is so much easier and faster than other backup methods, and insures you have all the right files/versions of the files in one place.