How do I get into my Quicken data when it requests a password but no password was set?

rchusid

I spent several hours this weekend getting things in Quicken ready for taxes. Last night I shut down Quicken after working on this. Today when I tried to use it there is a request for a file password but I never set one. It will open older backups but not the current file. I also made a backup of the file last night but that backup won't open either.

Normally if I had to revert to a backup it might not be so hard, but I have several hours work on this file. Any way to get into it or recover the data?

rchusid

If someone would happen to have an answer quickly it would be appreciated but the urgency has decreased. It turns out that I did take a break an hour or two before I finished. While I foolishly held off until I finished for the day to do a backup, I found that One Drive did backup the file from an hour or two before I finished. It would be great if I can restore the damaged file but repeating 1-2 hour's work isn't as disastrous as it could have been.

Sherlock

rchusid said:

If someone would happen to have an answer quickly it would be appreciated but the urgency has decreased. It turns out that I did take a break an hour or two before I finished. While I foolishly held off until I finished for the day to do a backup, I found that One Drive did backup the file from an hour or two before I finished. It would be great if I can restore the damaged file but repeating 1-2 hour's work isn't as disastrous as it could have been.

There is no known fix for the corruption you have described other than restoring a good backup.

Note; OneDrive may have corrupted your Quicken file. 

Quicken Jared

rchusid said:

If someone would happen to have an answer quickly it would be appreciated but the urgency has decreased. It turns out that I did take a break an hour or two before I finished. While I foolishly held off until I finished for the day to do a backup, I found that One Drive did backup the file from an hour or two before I finished. It would be great if I can restore the damaged file but repeating 1-2 hour's work isn't as disastrous as it could have been.

Hello @rchusid, 

I am sorry to hear about this issue with mysterious data file passwords. Thank you for drawing our attention to this problem here on the Quicken Community.

I want to be clear on the present circumstances. Are you able to access some data files without a password? Also, where is your current active data file located? You can check this anytime by going to File > Show this file on my computer in the upper menu at the top of the screen.

I am eager to hear more details about what is happening, should you have the chance to follow up with us about this.

Thank you,

Quicken Jared 

rchusid

The only Quicken file I have is this data file. I can access any backup from before the problem arose. The active file is in \Documents\Quicken. I use a third party backup program which makes copies of the file both on another computer on the network and to Google drive which I ran after I finished. These files would not open. Older backups made this way open with no problem.

As I said in my follow up comment, I later found that One Drive had a back up from earlier the same day which did open (making the loss of the main file much less serious than I had feared).

I tried things such as uninstalling and reinstalling Quicken, and tried opening the original file on a different computer. It continued to ask for a password.

When I opened a backup successfully I did verify that there was no password for the file (and have never had to give a password to get to my data). I also tried the validate function from the menu, but it also wouldn't run without a password.

Ps56k2

Quicken Jared said:  ... this issue with mysterious data file passwords.
Thank you for drawing our attention to this problem here on the Quicken Community.

This is a KNOWN and often posted bug -
where the Quicken data file does NOT have an existing Data File Password,
and then gets clobbered with a non-existing password - so the Forgot Password link does nothing....
Reported here lots...  only recourse is to find and Restore to a point prior to the "password" corruption.

rchusid

I have now restored everything which was lost. If this has been noted as a known and often posted bug have there been any comments as to whether this tends to recur or is generally an isolated event? At least if it happens most days it wouldn't be too hard to recover from a backup from the previous day. From now on if I have a day like yesterday in which I'm making a lot of changes I'll make periodic backups every hour or so.

Ps56k2

Only other comment would be - add a Data  File Password - that might prevent a bogus one being created