Was Update Accounts Disabled?

rleifield

I clicked on the Update Accounts circular arrow icon and none of my accounts are available in the One Step Update Settings screen. I cannot update an account individually either as that option does not seem to be available anymore. What is going on?

Rocket J Squirrel

Did you perhaps perform a File > Copy or Backup > Create a Copy?

That operation disconnects all your online accounts in the new copy. You'll have to reconnect them.

Rocket J Squirrel

Did you perhaps perform a File > Copy or Backup > Create a Copy?

That operation disconnects all your online accounts in the new copy. You'll have to reconnect them.

Frankx

Hi @rleifield,

Just to clarify - when you say "none of my accounts are available in the One Step Update Settings screen" I think you mean that there are no accounts listed on that screen.  If that is correct, and if you have in the past seen a list of accounts that you could update, then it seems clear that your previously "connected accounts" are no longer connected.

How long has it been since you last updated your accounts online?  Have you seen any other unexpected behavior in your Quicken datafile?  When did you last backup your datafile?

Frankx

rleifield

Thanks. I recently did a validate on my database and am now using the copy of the database that was validated and corrected. I didn’t know that the validate process disconnected all of my accounts from the account update process.

Rocket J Squirrel

rleifield said:

Thanks. I recently did a validate on my database and am now using the copy of the database that was validated and corrected. I didn’t know that the validate process disconnected all of my accounts from the account update process.

Validate doesn't disconnect accounts. Copy does.

rleifield

I did a validate. It created a file with a name that had copy at the end. I renamed that file and used it. It did not have the connections to my bank, etc. what should I have done differently?

rleifield

I followed the instructions on how to validate my primary file. Following these steps results in a validated and corrected COPY of your file. The errors still exist in the original file. To get any benefit out of the validate process you must use the copy, that was created and corrected, as your primary file. However, the copy of your original primary file does not have any connections to your financial institutions, so apparently, I am just now finding out, these connections now have to be created again in the corrected copy of the original primary file. These facts and related steps should be added to the validate instructions. With a warming about the lost connections.

Why not run the validate process on the original primary file after making the copy?

Rocket J Squirrel

There is some history here. Until very recently, the File Copy operation left online connections intact. But File Copy was, and still is, the only way to perform a record-by-record database copy (as opposed to a bit-by-bit Windows copy). This leaves behind items marked deleted, and often results in a smaller copy of the original file.

The recommended process for dealing with corruption was historically Copy, then Validate. The idea being to hand a cleaner, leaner database to the validation process.

Now, it's a pain to do this because Quicken Inc. decided to cause Copy to disconnect online accounts. I never understood why this was a good idea, but probably someone will chime in to remind me.

You can certainly Validate without first performing the Copy. The output of Validate will have the same name as your original file, which itself would be copied into the VALIDATE subfolder of your Quicken data folder.

Chris_QPW

Rocket J Squirrel said:

Now, it's a pain to do this because Quicken Inc. decided to cause Copy to disconnect online accounts. I never understood why this was a good idea, but probably someone will chime in to remind me.

There was a reason, but as suggested in one of the Ideas, both the old and the new copy should exist.

One tends to think of the data file as an "independent" thing, but it hasn't been since at least Quicken 2015.

There is in fact a "mated pairing" between the Quicken data file and the Quicken Cloud dataset.
Depending on which features you are using in Quicken these two have to stay in sync.

The classic example of the user causing them to be out of sync would be if the user uses Windows File Explorer to copy their data file (or the old version of Quicken's copy) and then started treating that data file as if it was a different data file (using it as a template for a new data file).

Each Quicken data file has an unique Id in it which is used to link it up to the Quicken Cloud dataset.
So, by making an exact copy of the file you now have two data files pointing at one Quicken Cloud dataset.
This isn't a problem if you are only going to use one at a time and copy the changes back over the other one (like you might do to share a data file).  But if you start using the second data file as a different data file, say deleting accounts and such then the moment Quicken syncs with that Quicken Cloud dataset it is going to delete that account there too.  Now the first data file is very much out of sync with the Quicken Cloud dataset it is still linked to.

This problem has been there for a very long time and it was suggested that Quicken provide a feature to change the unique Id in the data file.  Now if you have a data file with a new unique Id, clearly it isn't connected to any Quicken Cloud dataset or any of the services that was linked to.  So, along with changing the unique Id they would also need to disable all the online services.

The "new" copy does exactly that, it gives the new data file a new unique Id, and disables all the online services.  It makes a "template copy" that is truly independent.

Chris_QPW

And let me be clear my use of "sync" in the above comment isn't talking about just "Sync to Mobile/Web".
Express Web Connect, Quicken Bill Manager, and probably other services all have information in the Quicken Cloud dataset that has to be in sync with what is in the Quicken Desktop data file.