Budget Expenses disappeared

RMW

Just spent a couple of hours to update my 2022 budget. When all was complete and the budget was saved I went to dinner. After coming back from dinner all expense categories were zero. Nobody touched the computer during my absence. Somehow magically all my previous entries disappeared. What could have happened? Any ideas? Is there a way to restore my previously saved budget?

jacobs

After you were on the Edit Budget screen, are you certain you clicked "Save" to exit from that screen? (It's one of the few operations in Quicken where you must tell it to Save.) I know you won't like hearing this, and may dispute it, but it sounds like you accidentally hit Cancel on the Edit Budget screen instead of Save. 

After you edited your budget, did you quit Quicken, and then re-launch it when you came back after dinner? There's a slim but unlikely chance you opened an older version of your data file which didn't have the budget entries you made. It seems highly unlikely, but it's possible.

If you clicked Save on your budget and simply walked away and came back, I can't think of any explanation for your entries having completely vanished. I've never heard of anyone else having such a problem.

Assuming you are not in some older version of your data file, there's only one slim hope of recovery I can think of. If you have Time Machine backing up your Mac, and if there's a Time Machine backup which took place between you entering the data and coming back after dinner, it's possible that Time Machine version from an hour or two earlier might have your budget entries. Or maybe not. I don't know if Quicken writes budget changes to disk until you click Save; my guess is it simply stores them in memory and doesn't save them to the database until you click Save. But if it does save them, and you have a Time Machine backup at the right time, it might have your edits.

If it's of some small consolation, having lost things I've written or worked on for a while, I generally have found that re-creating it goes much faster because I remember most of the thought process I used previously.

RMW

I definitively Saved the budget. Actually multiple times as I progressed. After every Save all looked OK.
Interesting is that only the Expense categories disappeared. The income categories are OK and show the most recent edits. I know, it is very strange but I believe this is the second time this happened to me.
Time Machine does not show the file just at the time before dinner. An older automatic backup file shows the budget at that time but I can't transfer it to the current update of the Quicke data file.
I hesitate to recreate without knowing why this happened.

RMW

There is long thread on "Budgets disappear or unavailable". It seems to happen a lot to other users as well. In my case only Budget Expenses disappeared but I also lost all my entries in my 2021 Budget a few weeks ago. Seems like a major bug to me, possibly related to the Mobile Sync feature. I have turned that off now, added a few lines to my 2022 Budget, and will wait a few days to see if the problem still exists.

tdreed1265

Yes, this is a major defect with the Budget disappearing. I've had this happen too many times to count over the last 6 months and finally turned off the Mobile Sync feature a couple months ago. All was good until today when the budget disappeared again. I was able to restore from a backup (I backup every time now), so the damage was minimal. I discovered that somehow mobile synch had been turned on. Not sure how as I didn't do anything specific to turn it on.
It's becoming an adventure to use Quicken these days :-(
I'm sure this thread will be closed soon as any discussion of this issue is summarily ignored and then shut down by the moderators.

JMC

The budget feature remains pathetic. I save everything every night. I was told by the HELP DESK that my files are corrupt, and I would need to start all over. Validate, repair, yada yada. After years of no relief, it happened again in January; I decided to let Quicken build my budget based on years of input. It was adequate, and I tweaked it regularly. Today, randomly, it disappeared. My workaround is to save regularly, and when I open the most recent file, to not do a thing until I check to see if the budget has been hijacked...we need a PATCH...

jacobs

@JMC This thread is about Quicken Mac, and you're apparently referring to Quicken Windows. You might want to copy and paste your posts into a new thread in a Quicken Windows category of the site, so the Quicken Windows experts here will see it.