In Quicken 2016 0r 17 is it possible to remove data history from 2015 and older?

Unknown

Remove old data

mshiggins

It is possible to remove data in all versions of Quicken.



However, it rather defeats the purpose of having a complete view of your financial data to remove some of the data. And once removed, it's pretty much impossible to combine back into one data file again.



Can you explain why you want to remove data? Perhaps there is an alternate solution.

Unknown

Must be 10+ years of transactions and much of it not relevant today.  I have all data on separate drive as back up.  The routine backup seems to take long time.  Thinking is this could help speed up this step.

John_in_NC

Terry Drake said:

Must be 10+ years of transactions and much of it not relevant today.  I have all data on separate drive as back up.  The routine backup seems to take long time.  Thinking is this could help speed up this step.

There is no automated way of doing this-you would have to manually delete the transactions and update opening balance transactions. If you have investment accounts, then you encounter another whole bunch of issues. 

Follow mshiggins advise and leave all the data in a single spot-deleting older transactions is unlikely to have a big impact on performance. 

You may have your data all backed up in older files should you need to access them, but Quicken versions usually only support upgrading more recent versions. So, if you needed to access a file from, say 2004, you wouldn't be able to open it.  That is another reason it is wise to keep all data in one spot.

mshiggins

Terry Drake said:

Must be 10+ years of transactions and much of it not relevant today.  I have all data on separate drive as back up.  The routine backup seems to take long time.  Thinking is this could help speed up this step.

Wasn't there something about converted data remaining in the file after conversion and you could trim the file size by temoving the pre conversion data?

John_in_NC

Terry Drake said:

Must be 10+ years of transactions and much of it not relevant today.  I have all data on separate drive as back up.  The routine backup seems to take long time.  Thinking is this could help speed up this step.

Somewhat off topic, but I know what you are remembering: older versions did include a copy of the original (source) database within the data file. This could make the file larger.

The more recent versions of Quicken for Mac don't do this and they archive the old database in a backup folder.

Terry won't have to be concerned about this.

mshiggins

Terry Drake said:

Must be 10+ years of transactions and much of it not relevant today.  I have all data on separate drive as back up.  The routine backup seems to take long time.  Thinking is this could help speed up this step.

Got it, thanks.

Unknown

Many thanks to you both for the help!  I'll keep it as is.

Unknown

Terry Drake said:

Must be 10+ years of transactions and much of it not relevant today.  I have all data on separate drive as back up.  The routine backup seems to take long time.  Thinking is this could help speed up this step.

I have payment data from the beginning of 2008 in accounts that no longer exist.  I cannot delete the accounts or their data.  I fail to see why payable accounts from 10 years ago would have a effect on my current payable accounts.   

Unknown

I have used quicken for years and have bank account data, for example, going back to 2000.  Currently have quicken 2018 and it takes a long time to load.  Person from quicken said size of data file (133 MB) will have an impact on loading time.  Tried method of deleting transactions from bank account but get message " one or more transactions could not be deleted because they are locked children of a split transfer."  The result is basically no deletions.  
Quicken used to have capability to delete all transactions before a specified date.  Quicken needs to resurrect this capability because data deletions need to be "intelligent" in terms of deleting data from all accounts at the same time.  Only the ability to tie all the pieces together will work correctly.  Over time, how many people really want 20+ years of detailed data?