Why can I not open old Quicken files in old versions of Quicken Mac?

KingGhidorah

Hi folks, I bought an old OS9 Mac on eBay, in part, so that I could open old files that do not open in more recent versions of the Mac OS. However, so far, that investment has not paid off.

Quicken files that were made in 1999, 2000 and 2001 do not open in Quicken 2002 in OS9.

For those familiar with the Classic Environment emulator SheepShaver, I also tried there. I keep getting a CarbonLib error message.

When I tried the conversion techniques described by Quicken on this site, I am told a "resource fork is missing".

I think I might have an idea of what's going on, but I'd like to hear your ideas out there.

Thank you!

UKR

For future reference:
When going forward to a new version of Quicken and/or Mac, it's always a good idea to open ALL the old files that you have created over time and let them go through any file conversion / upgrade process as needed. That ensures that you can open the old files with the now newest version of Quicken.

Jon

"Resource fork is missing" sounds to me like the files were damaged at some point in the last 20+ years by being moved to a computer not running Mac OS that didn't understand resource forks (or the resource fork may have been lost when the files were previously moved from OS9 to OS X).

I don't know if there's a way to recover from that.

KingGhidorah

Well, today I was able to partially open some of them. I think that I might have resaved these files in Mac OS X under a Carbon version of Quicken. Just a guess. But, like I said, I was able to recover some of the data. It will have to do as I'm not going to buy a Tiger-running Mac and find out after several hundred dollars that that was not the problem.

(Too bad I couldn't open these in some sort of generic program and convert them to PDFs or something.)

Thanks :)

UKR

For future reference:
When going forward to a new version of Quicken and/or Mac, it's always a good idea to open ALL the old files that you have created over time and let them go through any file conversion / upgrade process as needed. That ensures that you can open the old files with the now newest version of Quicken.

KingGhidorah

I wish I'd known that 23 years ago :) But, good advice from here on.

Thanks!

lisalung

Hi! I backed up my files to Carbonite from my 2015 MacBook Pro, transferred everything over to my newer 2019 MacBook Pro last year. I found my Quicken 2007 data file and tried to open it in the newer version of Quicken and I'm getting the same problem others do when they transfer the datafile without zipping it first. I sold that computer a while ago, so I no longer have access to it.

My question here is: If I find another older Mac and install Quicken on that, can I save my account info? Thanks!

jacobs

Probably not, but it's hard to know. If the problem is with Carbonite's backup of the data file, then no matter where you restore it, you'll have a problem.

But I'd note that the problem the original poster above described was dealing with very, very old (pre Mac OS X) Quicken data files. Yours sounds like it was probably an up-to-date Quicken 2007 data file, and you shouldn't have the same issue. Are you getting the resource fork error, or something else?  

KingGhidorah

Hello Lisa, Jacobs,

I was able to open some of my data. Not all of it, but some of it from 2000 or thereabouts was accessible. I did it by

a. Changing the file extension of the files in question to .QDEF (I think that's what it was), and

b. I opened modern Quicken. In current versions, there's an option to open as 2007, or something like that. The steps escape me (were they described earlier in this thread perhaps? Or maybe I got them from the Quicken site).

But, doing these two things helped me access some of my ancient data.

My guess is that the files that were written by the Carbon version of Quicken (MacOS X era) were written in such a way that earlier MacOS 9 versions of Quicken could not do anything with.

I hope this made some sense??

jacobs

That's a good point to bring up, @KingGhidorah . The extension for a Quicken 2007 data file must be .qdfm (as in Quicken Data File Mac). Really old versions of Quicken — from the OS9 days and earlier — did not use file extensions at all; the information to associate a file with a software application was contained in the file's resource fork. My recollection if the data file is really old and lacks the .qdfm extension, Quicken 2007 running under Mac OS X could deal with it, but the modern Quicken Mac converter would not recognize the file.

So it's definitely worth checking to see if the file has the .qdfm extension, and adding it if not. If I recall correctly, when I converted my parents to the modern Quicken Mac a while back, I needed to do this. (What I don't recall is whether the.qdfm extension was unchanged going back to the 1990s -- but I'd definitely try this.)