Cannot make manual additions to early price history for certain (but not all) securities

mshiggins

MegM said:

Dear Lurker,

You are truly marvelous in being willing to come back and try to sort out this chopped up story. 

I have used QW2011 for ALL of my quicken work since 2010 and it has never crashed.  It has always seemed very stable.   in fact, I have used QW2011 or its predecessors almost daily since about 1991.  However, the fanciest thing I have ever done with QW is an investment file that contains separate accounts for single mutual funds, so I have not really tested QW2011 on anything as complex as a multi-fund brokerage account.  I installed QW2017 on one machine last week, but solely for the purpose of building this brokerage account with newly downloaded transactions through 2018.  All of my other QW files remain in Q2011 and I plan to keep them that way (on the theory that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it").  My Quicken files of all vintages are on my own hard drives (just as you suggest), which are fairly new (1 year old and 2 months old) so quite healthy.  

I have been making copies of my problem QW2017 brokerage file periodically as I progress through the process of adding missing transactions by hand, but after both first and second crashes, I foolishly continued working on the same file, rather than a slightly older copy of it.   (I didn't want to lose the transactions I had just added by hand, but the first crash happened so FAST that I had not yet made a copy of it.)  I have now decided, after the latest crash-and-data-failure, to stop -- as you point out, the data loss is very worrisome, and the crashes signify that something is deeply wrong.    In fact, I have returned to the QW2011 original (which I did validate before starting this time, just in case).  It is hard (tedious, stupid) work but I have not had a glitch since.  Best of all, the added months of data all produce holdings reports that match the paper reports.  I validated the QW2011 file before starting to add entries (no errors, but "some transactions were changed," which mystifies me!).   I should have done that before launching the QW2017 effort laslt week, but I don't think I did (I had no idea my file was afflicted).  

I don't think I can figure out the crashes, which do indeed scare me.  So I just took the plunge and returned to QW2011 and the hard slogging of making manual entries (and I check them against the paper reports and make a new backup at the end of every month of additions).  When I get up to April 2015 (which is the date beyond which my QW2017 files offer downloaded transactions as a tempting labor-saving device), I plan to experiment with a conversion to QW2017 and importing the transactions from the existing file.   Or from a newly downloaded file that I can validate first (but this will lack a year of transactions I will still have to add manually.)   But I worry that I will be contaminating my clean file (the QW2011 file that I have to convert to QW2017 to do this) when that, which will drive me back to the clean QW2011 file to continue by hand.  

Thank you for your fantastic suggestion about downloading .csv files from Yahoo and the like to get full price history and then editing it in Excel to produce a file I could import as new price history.  

And it is valuable for me to keep in mine that QW2017 should have fewer bugs in it than QW2011 does, despite my experience to the contrary!  

MegM

From C. D. Bales:


"Thanks JM. The link that you and Markus sent doesn't cover Quicken 2011".


But it does.


All versions newer than the newest version named in that link as requiring an intermediate version to convert (2009 is the newest version named in the link that requires an intermediate version to convert) ... do not require an intermediate version to convert.

q_lurker

MegM said:

Dear Lurker,

You are truly marvelous in being willing to come back and try to sort out this chopped up story. 

I have used QW2011 for ALL of my quicken work since 2010 and it has never crashed.  It has always seemed very stable.   in fact, I have used QW2011 or its predecessors almost daily since about 1991.  However, the fanciest thing I have ever done with QW is an investment file that contains separate accounts for single mutual funds, so I have not really tested QW2011 on anything as complex as a multi-fund brokerage account.  I installed QW2017 on one machine last week, but solely for the purpose of building this brokerage account with newly downloaded transactions through 2018.  All of my other QW files remain in Q2011 and I plan to keep them that way (on the theory that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it").  My Quicken files of all vintages are on my own hard drives (just as you suggest), which are fairly new (1 year old and 2 months old) so quite healthy.  

I have been making copies of my problem QW2017 brokerage file periodically as I progress through the process of adding missing transactions by hand, but after both first and second crashes, I foolishly continued working on the same file, rather than a slightly older copy of it.   (I didn't want to lose the transactions I had just added by hand, but the first crash happened so FAST that I had not yet made a copy of it.)  I have now decided, after the latest crash-and-data-failure, to stop -- as you point out, the data loss is very worrisome, and the crashes signify that something is deeply wrong.    In fact, I have returned to the QW2011 original (which I did validate before starting this time, just in case).  It is hard (tedious, stupid) work but I have not had a glitch since.  Best of all, the added months of data all produce holdings reports that match the paper reports.  I validated the QW2011 file before starting to add entries (no errors, but "some transactions were changed," which mystifies me!).   I should have done that before launching the QW2017 effort laslt week, but I don't think I did (I had no idea my file was afflicted).  

I don't think I can figure out the crashes, which do indeed scare me.  So I just took the plunge and returned to QW2011 and the hard slogging of making manual entries (and I check them against the paper reports and make a new backup at the end of every month of additions).  When I get up to April 2015 (which is the date beyond which my QW2017 files offer downloaded transactions as a tempting labor-saving device), I plan to experiment with a conversion to QW2017 and importing the transactions from the existing file.   Or from a newly downloaded file that I can validate first (but this will lack a year of transactions I will still have to add manually.)   But I worry that I will be contaminating my clean file (the QW2011 file that I have to convert to QW2017 to do this) when that, which will drive me back to the clean QW2011 file to continue by hand.  

Thank you for your fantastic suggestion about downloading .csv files from Yahoo and the like to get full price history and then editing it in Excel to produce a file I could import as new price history.  

And it is valuable for me to keep in mine that QW2017 should have fewer bugs in it than QW2011 does, despite my experience to the contrary!  

MegM

And it is valuable for me to keep in mind that QW2017 should have fewer bugs in it than QW2011 does...

Not necessarily.  Conceptually, it is a valid expectation, but as new features are added, code is updated, and old bugs addressed, new bugs appear.  In addition, sometimes OS changes create situations or expose weaknesses with existing code in the program.   

From my seat, I used QW2011 for several years and found it to be very stable.
I have used QW2017 for a bit over a year.  I have had crashes maybe once every two to three months, but no loss of data or discernible damage to the data file.  

Especially since you have recently installed QW2017, I would suggest you reinstall the program.  This is a very cautious, perhaps overly so, approach toward doing so:
https://getsatisfaction.com/quickencommunity/topics/installing-reinstalling-and-upgrading-to-windows...  Personally, I would try a simpler approach first, but I admit I have not attempted a program re-install with QW2017.  

It may be that applying/re-applying the latest Mondo patch would be helpful, rather than re-installing the whole program.  https://www.quicken.com/support/patching-updates-windows