Restoring a single account which is broken and won't reconcile

charred_water

I have a single CC account which is corrupted and won't reconcile. When I try to reconcile it shows all the past transactions, even those which have already been reconciled, as if there were no starting date for the reconcile. I tried checking off just the last month's transactions, but the reconcile does not work normally.

The Validate operation found a damaged transaction index for this CC account. It found invalid transactions and removed them. But reconcile still shows all past transactions.

If I restore a good backup and export the damaged CC account as a QIF file, do I need to delete the damaged CC account from my current working Quicken account before I import the QIF file from the good backup? Or will the imported QIF file overwrite the existing transactions for the damaged CC account?

Also, will transfers between the damaged CC account and other accounts like my checking account be restored after importing the QIF file from the good backup?

Chris_QPW

I suggest that instead you try moving the transactions to a new account using this procedure.
FAQ: How Do I Move Transactions Between Quicken Accounts? — Quicken

Trying to restore one account by QIF is very error prone due to the linked transfers to other accounts, which Quicken will not match.

charred_water

Thanks for your suggestion, but I don't think it's applicable to my situation, since I want to restore a damaged account from a quicken backup database. Using your technique I would have to copy the entire account from the backup database and paste it into my current quicken database.

Chris_QPW

If the damaged account is still in the current data file you are fixing it "in place".  As in you are moving the transactions from the damaged account to a new one and then deleting the damaged one.

If for some reason you have to restore from a backup to fix the problem you would of course restore the whole data file from a point before the damage to the account and then bring all the accounts up to date.

Depending on how long ago that is and how many transfers there are from the credit card account to other accounts will determine if it is easier to restore from a complete backup and update or import a QIF file.  But importing a QIF file is certainly not "easy".

And just to be clear the import of the QIF file would be into new account, not the old one because as you said it is corrupted.

charred_water

I have damaged account in my current Quicken data file.

So I should create a new account in my current Quicken data file which will replace the damaged account.

Then I select all the transactions in the damaged account and copy them.

Then I paste the copied transactions into the new empty account.

Is this correct?

And somehow, the copied transactions in the new account will not have the damage in the original account?
Plus if this works, the transfers from the damaged account to other accounts will not be lost as they are when account is created by importing QIF file.

Can I ask you another question? If I were to import a QIF file from a backup into my current Quicken data, do I have to delete the damaged account before importing the QIF? Or does the QIF overwrite the existing transactions in the damaged account?

Thanks for your help!

Chris_QPW

To answer the first part.  You have the procedure correct.  As for will this fix the problem?
Well it really depends on where the corruption is, but I can say that accounts can get corrupted and the procedure might fix it because the corruption is left in the old account which is eventually deleted.

As for the importing of a QIF file.  You can import a QIF file into the old account, but all that would accomplish is duplicating all the transactions.  Quicken Subscription makes no attempt at matching existing transactions.  What's more even if it did the likelihood is that the corruption isn't in the transactions themselves, but in data that is stored in the account that you can't see.

As for importing the QIF file into another account.  When you import a transaction which is a transfer to another account it is going to create another transaction in that other account.  If Quicken had proper handling of importing such transfers it might be able to detect this situation and not create such a transaction, but it doesn't.  On the other hand maybe that is what would be right if one was thinking that once you imported those transactions into the new account you would delete the old account and believe that it would delete the transfer to the other accounts.  But it won't.  Deleting an account that has transfers to another account will break the link transfer connection and leave a transactions with the category of [Unspecified Account].  So at a minimum you would have to find and delete those transactions, and you would have to reconcile any such accounts since al the new transfers wouldn't be reconciled.

charred_water

I decided to revert to a backup when I found my 6/3/21 backup was okay. Painful to re-enter a month's worth of expenses, but not unmanageable.

Silly question. How do I replace my original JOINT.QDF file? When I try to copy my restored backup file it says JOINT.QDF already exists, pick another name. In the past, Quicken had multiple JOINT.* files so I'm reluctant to manually copy to the JOINT.QDF file. Can I just rename the JOINT.QDF and then do Quicken copy?

Thanks for your help!

Boatnmaniac

charred_water said:

Silly question. How do I replace my original JOINT.QDF file? When I try to copy my restored backup file it says JOINT.QDF already exists, pick another name. In the past, Quicken had multiple JOINT.* files so I'm reluctant to manually copy to the JOINT.QDF file. Can I just rename the JOINT.QDF and then do Quicken copy?

You can name the copied file anything you want.  What I usually do when I make a copy is to add a dash number to the original file name during the copy naming step.  Example:  The copy of JOINT.QDF would be named JOINT-1.QDF.

Or, you can rename JOINT.QDF to JOINT-1.QDF and then copy JOINT-1.QDF and name it as JOINT.QDF.

Naming of files is pretty flexible.