from personal experience

1. start with the newest SYSTEM.ZIP backup , this will restore your companies USER, FORMS , SECURITY

will that bring the company data, ie orders, customer info, etc as well?

and how do  you install it into the program?

From RESTORE  in the FILE menu

Q. Do you have your data in BW ZIP files or did you copy it from a folder/ backup hard drive?

the system .zip file  these are the files you get when you run the internal backup program in BW. If you don't call Sage and get the KB # for the "folder" option.

the SYSTEM ZIP file will contain  USER, PASSWORDs, Security to each company and customized FORMs for each company

From RESTORE  in the FILE menu

Q. Do you have your data in BW ZIP files or did you copy it from a folder/ backup hard drive?

the system .zip file  these are the files you get when you run the internal backup program in BW. If you don't call Sage and get the KB # for the "folder" option.

the SYSTEM ZIP file will contain  USER, PASSWORDs, Security to each company and customized FORMs for each company

here is what we were doing-we had a backup going to crashplan-i have the bw data folder and the bw prog folder-we were not running the internal bw backup-would it not be possible to just overwrite the bw data folder that is in the new install with our backed up data folder copy? would that not just place the data in the program or are there other things i need to do?

there are other things that go on with the "system" backup that are needed

If you don't have that , CALL SAGE for instruction

Some one runs the company close at the end of the month?  Do they skip the "backup" before running the month close?  The ZIP backup/restore is the easiest option, just a pain in the a$$ to do it becassue there is no automation.

that would be a backup that would be resident on the server-the server was fried, so that backup would have been of no use to us-we were backing up the data offsite to crashplan-that is what i am trying to put back on the new server

in other words i have the actual data folder from our last backup before the crash-i just need the data that is in that folder to be able to accessed by the new install of businessworks on our new server.

sounds bad , if you haven't called Sage now is the time.

My backup strat is currently backup up to  Amazon S3, a local NAS and an external USB drive

and every thursday evening, I manually run the BW backup for all 6 of our companies and the system backup. and those get sent to the Amazon S3 cloud too