Hello Managrovekickflip,

I would not call it weird, since, as a support tech, I have seen stranger things. The only real practical reason to separate out the company like that would be a consideration of the asset count. Once upon a time we use to recommended not keeping more that 8 to 10 thousand assets in a single database, that number is now 50 thousand, so if these are rather large companies or prior year copies are being kept, there could be a reason to keep only one company in a database. Those limits are to avoid performance issues more than anything else.

As for the backup, again as a support tech, the company backup through the program is the safest way of doing the backups and anything outside of that would be considered a third-party process. While keeping a copy of the database file is also a way to back up the data, we would not have any advice on how to go about that.

Note: If you have PDF attachments on your assets, a restore from a copy of the database file can lose the link to those files. It is usually fixable, but it is a rather tedious process.

~Delray