What happened to all my data?

Warren3

This evening I opened my Quicken application, as I have done every night for as long as I can remember. Last week I updated my Mac operating system tp Ventura. A dialog box appeared telling me "This is an older copy of a file that is using Quicken Cloud. You can’t use connected services with this file unless you reset Quicken Cloud using the data from this file. Resetting will require you to re-set up any accounts connected for download. Do you want to reset Quicken Cloud using the data from this file. My options are "Take file offline" "Reset Quicken Cloud" or "Decide later" Interestingly, none of my extensive accounting shows up from after 2018! It is all gone. Before I move forward and run the risk of losing data, has anyone else experienced this, and if so, what did you do to restore data? I appreciate your help.

jacobs

It sounds like in the update to Ventura, the Quicken preferences file which stores the location of the last-used data file lost that setting. (Other users have reported other preference settings which need to be reset after upgrading to Ventura.) I would not proceed, and quit Quicken. Then, navigate to where your Quicken data files are stored, and look for one with a modification date from last week prior to your operating system upgrade. Double-click on the data file to have Quicken open it, and see if it contains all your recent data. You may have to do some trial and error to find the latest one. (You can also select a backup file from last week.) the key is finding a data file which is not the one you recently opened, which was clearly an old data file on your computer, but the one you were using up until the Ventura upgrade.

Warren3

I was able to restore the missing data from a backup copy and reconstruct things from the few days that were not included. The question that remains... why would Quicken, for no apparent reason, spontaneously delete everything after 2018? I was using the most current version and I updated all of my accounts last month. Threw quite a scare into me as all of my finances exist within Quicken, which I have used since the software was first released. It would be helpful to have an explanation from the Quicken leadership as to what happened. To be safe, I'm doing a manual backup every time I open Quicken. Until this incident, no significant problems, and have been a very satisfied user.

jacobs

Quicken did not spontaneously delete four years of data. Rather, it opened an old data file you had on your computer, because it didn't know the most-recently used data file after the operating system upgrade. 

you don't need to do a manual backup every time you open Quicken if you have your Preferences set to save a backup automatically every time you quit Quicken. (Which you definitely should.) If you haven't done so, change the default setting of 5 backup files to a much larger number — 25 or 50. The data files aren't that huge, and when you run into a problem, you don't want to find out that you don't have backups going back far enough. (If you are set the the default 5 backups, and you launch and quit Quicken a few times in one day trying to troubleshoot something, you might find your oldest backup is only a couple days old.) Also, you hopefully have something backing up your Mac data in general, like Time Machine or a cloud-based backup service like iDrive or Backblaze. With these two layers of backup protection, you should be able to recover from almost any problem situation.

P.S. You won't get "an explanation from the Quicken leadership" here. Ever.

jacobs

DocGer said:

I have to disagree with your statement to have an automatic backup done every time you exit Quicken Mac. Sometimes I access Quicken multiple times in one day. I may make a change to my data, but I may only open it to reference some data. I really don't want or need to have a backup of my data file every single time I exit Quicken. Once a day is sufficient in most cases.

In prior versions, Quicken was smart about backing up: if you launched Quicken and simply looked at your data, without entering/editing anything, and then quit, it would not do the backup. I was actually surprised to see that this is no longer the case; I'm not sure when it changed. I'd guess that there were too many things for the program to keep track of to determine if anything had actually changed, so they just made it backup all the time.

But here's my point: who cares if you have 50 automatic backups? Unless you are using a Mac where your hard drive storage is tight, whether you have 25 or 50 or 75 backups is likely irrelevant. My Quicken backups occupy about 2 GB; I have hundreds of free gigabytes of space available. Quicken manages the backups and I never have to think about it.

I have rarely needed to open a Quicken backup; I just want to know I'll have what I need should I need it. And I also have Time Machine. And I also have iDrive. I learned years ago that when there's a major problem, it can kill you in unexpected ways, and it's better to have multiple layers of protection. (I once had a hard drive fail, and my two whole disk backups both failed to restore correctly due to bad sectors on the disk; only my third backup on Time Machine saved the day. the next week, I added iDrive cloud backup, for another layer or protection, plus protection in case my house is broken into or destroyed.) 

jacobs

@DocGer Why so testy? I wasn’t “lecturing” you; I was suggesting for the original poster, and anyone else reading this thread, that multiple types of backups are desirable.

You might have missed my comment above that Quicken Mac previously did *not* execute a backup-on-quit if no data had been changed — exactly what you say you’d like to see — but they apparently gave up on that approach somewhere along the way. I hadn’t noticed the behavior had changed.

My point about all these backups is that for most people, setting the number of retained backups to a high number (like 50 or more) insures that even if you end up deleting my 5 in a day, you still have backups going back far enough to recover from most problems. And if this approach doesn’t work for you, no problem, don’t do it. But I think for the vast majority of Quicken Mac users, it’s a sound approach.