Backup year end with Quicken for Mac 2017

System

This discussion was created from comments split from: Add Ability to Print List of Accounts and Balances in Quicken for Mac (34 Legacy Votes).

Paul Levy

Can someone get me started with this--everything I find is for Windows only.

Quicken Sarah

Hello @Paul Levy

Thank you for taking the time to share your question with the Community, although I apologize that you have not yet received a response.

If you are still needing assistance with getting started in Quicken, please take a moment and review the information available here, and post back to let us know what version and release of Quicken you are using.

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The more information you can provide regarding this issue will help the Community to better understand and assist. 

Thank you,

Sarah

jacobs

@Paul Levy If you're asking how to do a year-end copy in Quicken Mac 2017, the short answer is that you can't, as that feature doesn't exist in Quicken Mac at this time. 

The key question I'd ask is what problems are you encountering with the lack of this feature? If the answer is that it's just the way you've always done it, I'd definitely encourage you to rethink your approach. By creating separate annual files, you are working uphill against much of the functionality Quicken offers. Separate annual files prevent you from running comparison reports, and finding older transactions can require hunting through multiple old files.

Additionally, every time there is an update to Quicken's database format, it is imperative that you open and update all your prior year files. The reason is that Quicken doesn't indefinitely support opening old data files. There was a user who posted in this forum in the past several days about needing to find some data in old annual Quicken files and finding that they can't be read by the current version of Quicken; that user faces a daunting task of finding an old Mac and old version of the software as a bridge to the current Quicken Mac, or never being able to access his old data. We see users in this unfortunate situation on a recurring basis on this forum.

In older versions of Quicken, both Windows and Mac, the databases could become slow when they got large, develop data corruption, or flat-out run out of space for transactions, and those issues forced the developers to create ways to save copies with more limited data. The modern Quicken Mac doesn't have the Save A Copy feature (at least so far) because the modern database doesn't have the limitations that the older generations did. Database technology has advanced a great deal since the early days of Mac OS and Windows, and Quicken Mac uses the same SQL database that powers many parts of the modern Mac (and Windows) operating system, and many other applications. Quicken Mac was designed to have data filters pretty much everywhere in registers in reports, to make it easy to only see current (or past) year data when you don't want to see everything.

Of course, it's still a good idea to manually save a copy (in the Finder) from time to time, so you have multiple layers of backups should something go wrong in the future. But unless it's causing you some specific problem to have your prior year data in your data file, I'd recommend you just use Quicken the way it was designed to keep your entire history in one place.