ChequeMaster stores everything locally. Your cheque history, payees, bank accounts, cheque books and settings sit in a database on your own computer and are never uploaded to us.

That is a deliberate privacy decision, and it comes with one obligation: if the PC fails and you have no backup, the records are gone. We cannot restore them, because we never had them.

What is worth backing up

  • The database — every cheque, payee, account and book. This is the irreplaceable part.
  • Your settings values — margins, decimal digits, lakh or million, currency, date format. Quick to re-enter if you noted them; tedious to rediscover by trial and error.
  • Your licence key — you will need it after any reinstall.
  • Custom layouts — if you built layouts from your own scans rather than using pre-loaded ones, they represent real work.

How often

Match it to how much re-entry you could tolerate. For most businesses:

  • Printing cheques daily → back up weekly.
  • Printing a few times a month → back up monthly, and after any large run.
  • Always back up before reinstalling, upgrading Windows, or changing machines.

Where to put it

The one rule: not only on the same computer. A backup on the drive that fails is not a backup.

  • An external drive or USB stick kept somewhere else.
  • A cloud folder that syncs off the machine.
  • A network location, if you have one that is itself backed up.

Two copies in different places is the realistic target. If you keep the backup in a cloud folder, remember the records include payee names and amounts — treat the folder as you would any financial file.

Test the restore

An untested backup is a guess. Once, on a spare machine or after a reinstall, restore from your backup and confirm your cheque books and history are actually there. People discover broken backup routines at exactly the wrong moment.

Why not cloud sync?

Occasionally people ask why ChequeMaster does not just store data on our servers and remove the problem. Because the tradeoff runs the other way: keeping cheque records off the internet means a breach on our side cannot expose your payment history. The cost of that is that backups are yours to run. See our privacy policy for what we do and do not hold.