Backup Files

thecreator

From the Release Notes:

Improved: QXF data files from the Mac Starter Edition can now be imported by the Windows Starter Edition.

Can Windows Starter Edition's Manual Backup Data File, be restored to Mac Starter Edition?

Chris_QPW

There should be no reason why they can't.  A Quicken Starter edition data file isn't any different than any other edition.  The restrictions are created by the program looking at the license and changing what the user can do.  Both the data file and the program are the same.

These days what happens for a conversion to Quicken Mac is the user copies their data file (or a backup of it) to the Mac and then on the Mac (or actually submitted to a server) the data file is given to a version of Quicken Windows (run in Wine) to export the QXF file, which is in turn imported into Quicken Mac.  This is currently done on a server because the Mac has gone to 64-bit only and Quicken/Wine are 32-bit programs, so they have a virtual environment setup to do the conversion.  I'm not even sure if the their version of Quicken Windows is they "most recent" since it has always been the Mac group that has pushed to make that conversion to QXF "right for Mac".  So even though you can export a QXF file from any edition of Quicken Windows, I'm not sure it is as "complete" as just using the Quicken data file and their converter.

So the old days of requiring an export from Quicken Windows as a QXF file is gone.

So the release notes are all about the other direction.  In the past the Starter version wouldn't import a QXF file, and as such you couldn't convert from Quicken Mac using the Starter edition.  As I said the only reason this was true is because they didn't make that menu option available in the Starter edition.  So it looks like they corrected (changed their minds) on that and now the Starter edition can import the QXF file.