Can I save each calendar year as a separate file?

ramjetx

Before I went from Quicken 2007 to a subscription, I was able to "start a new year" thus allowing me to save each individual calendar year as a separate file which I placed on an external drive for safe keeping. Am I able to do that with the latest subscription v. 6.5.1?

jacobs

No. That functionality in the old versions of Quicken basically existed because there were file size limitations and data corruption issues with the database that program used. The industrial database used in modern Quicken has no size limitations and no corruption issue, so the developers have not created a similar feature.

One of the benefits of Quicken is having all your financial data in one place, and separating it out by year makes search back through your history a more difficult job. Many people (myself included) have upwards of 20 years of data in our data file. Every register and every report can be filters to show just data from the current year or past year if you find seeing all the old data gets in your way.

For safe keeping, by all means you want to have regular backups and save them in case something should go wrong and you need to go back in time. Quicken makes automatic backups every time your quit, and I have it set to retain the most recent 25 of these backups. I also generate a manual backup roughly once a month, so I have a permanent collection of backups going back years. And my live data file plus my backups and all my other data is backed up continuously by the Time Machine software built into macOS, as well as by a cloud backup service (iDrive) so I have off-site backups. One can never have too many backups! But you don't need to separate your Quicken data file each year to safely back up your data.