good way to find and restore quicken data and quick backup files from a crash drive's metadata

Question

I purchased a disk recovery application stellar and tried to find any quicken backup files on the crashed drive an tried to use some older backup files found on one drive to try and restore the ones that were no longer found directly on the drive because when trying to fix the issue with the corrupt drive , i must of said recover from scratch and it never recovered

put the drive into a usb drive enclosure and can not find the quicken files directly

Used stellar to try to recover all the quicken backups and need a signature for the QDF-Back file types

My older backups are over 150MB.  There are many accounts and many years of data on the backups

How can on recover the quick backup files from the metadata on a crashed hard drive drive that no longer are associated with the correct file types

Snowman · Answer

Sorry, I think we've all been in your situation before. I should have added that one should not use onedrive, google drive or any other cloud storage for primary and secondary backups because of just this issue. One question I always get is how often should I backup? My answer is what is your tolerance for reentering data? The answer in my case is I backup after every session (with the add date and time to file name) selected. If I am reconciling a number of files I may backup several times in a day. I tend to keep at least a years worth of backups.

Seven years ago I found out that my main checking account in Quicken was corrupted. I had to go back seven months before I found a backup where that account was not corrupted. Because of all of the transfers and interactions with other accounts I had to go back and recreate those seven months, at least is was better than the 17 years of data I had at the time. That is when I started to validate my file on a weekly basis instead of as a last resort.

Jim Madl · Answer

@snowman, thanks for the response. yes redundacy is the key and I really thought the recent backups were being stored on onedrive but obviously they were not.  I guess I have to bite the bullet and use the newest backup and restore it and then recreate all the data from that point on till now to get every thing back up guess I just wasted $100 on the recovery software

Snowman · Answer

The short answer is that you probably can't. A professional data recovery service may be able to help but the more you tinker with the drive the chance of recovery becomes remote.

When backing up ANYTHING, you should have at least two unique backup destinations (drives, thumb drive, etc.) AND the data and the backup files should NEVER be on the same drive because if the drive fails you lose your data and the backup.

It is a simple matter of playing "What if…". For Quicken I backup everyday to an NAS drive on my network (backup #1). Every night that NAS drive is backed up to different NAS drive on the computer (backup #2). I go one step further and twice a month I backup to a plug in hard drive (backup #3) and when the backup is removed it is stored in a safe. There is another Backup #4 which is another plug in hard drive that I rotate first using #3 then #4. Another tool is that when I do a validate (at least once a week if not more) I save the validate text file with the date of the Validation as the file name. That way I have a record of the last date that my backup file was validated.

Why the 2 or more different backup destinations? Simple there is always the possibility that backup #1 can be corrupted or damaged. That is why you have backup #2. The chances that backup #1 and #2 will both be corrupted is remote BUT the whole computer and or the NAS drives could be damaged by a direct lightening strike or another occurrence and that is why I have #3 and #4 that is are disconnected from the computer and the network.