Attachments and links when moving to a new Mac

Geo H

I plan on moving my Quicken for Mac to a new computer. I have attached many documents to transactions. Are these links part of my daily backups or will I have to reestablish all new links? I am never sure if the documents I attach are duplicated inside Quicken or it is just a link to the existing file I select when I add the attachment. Can you explain the actual process?

jacobs

What version of Quicken Mac are you using?

But to answer your question, yes, your attached files -- the actual files, not links -- are part of your data file, and will move when you move the data file. A Quicken data file is actually a specific type of Mac file called a "package", which puts a wrapper around a collection of files and folders and allows the macOS to show it and treat it as if it was a single file.

So inside your Quicken data file, there are actually several folders, and one file called "data" which is the actual database of your Quicken data. One of the folders inside the data file package is called "attachments", and within that folder is where Quicken creates folders for each attachment and stores the actual attachments. You can see this if you Control-click on your data file and select Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu. Here's mine from a sample data file where I just added two attachments:



(Note: peek inside the data file if you want, but do not move, delete, or edit any filenames, or you might lock yourself out of accessing your data.)

Geo H

Jacobs, I am using the latest Mac version, which is 5.12.5 I believe. Thanks for the detailed explanation! So if I attached a scanned file from another folder outside of Quicken, it makes a COPY of that file when I attached it and saves it in the Quicken "attachments" folder. Correct? That explains why when I have made changes to the original scanned file it is not updated in Quicken.

jacobs

Correct. Attachments are exactly that -- attached files.

If Quicken allowed links to external files, I can imagine it would be a support nightmare! Users routinely don't even know where their Quicken data files or backups are; imagine the confusion if users could link files from anywhere and then moved them, renamed files and enclosing folders, etc.