Reducing the size of my Quicken file

Doug Dubowski

I have a quicken file that I have used for over 20 years. It is getting larger and larger (over 163 MB). Some of the old data in old accounts is of no further use and I would like to discard those accounts. Can I delete those accounts without affecting my Quicken data file and the performance of Quicken or am I asking for trouble? I can always get back to the old information through a backup file if I need it, but I don't expect I will. Any help appreciated. Thanks

Doug

Arctic Hare

My Quicken file is 1,300 MB and I have no plan to start deleting accounts or archive some years of data. If you don't have any significant performance problems, I wouldn't start deleting stuff. If you do start deleting accounts you'll encounter some implications like breaking transfers. This is not necessarily a problem, but the transfer will refer to an "unspecified account". You could also use the Year End Copy feature to shed older years worth of data. This has similar implications. Again, it is supposed to work fine, but can have some implications. If your data file size is causing performance issues then you need to take action, but if you don't have performance issues, I would not bother. If I were choosing between deleting accounts and shedding years, I think I'd shed years. However, my 1,300 MB data file doesn't seem to cause performance issues, so I'll leave well enough alone.

Someone is going to jump in here and point out that data file size can be materially impacted by attachments. Mine does have attachments, but not many recent attachments as I've come to the view that attaching documents into Quicken isn't very helpful and I keep the would be attachments elsewhere now - for the most part. What amount of the 1,300 MB file is attachments? I'm not sure.

Procopio

I've often thought about starting a new Quicken file. Just leave the old one where it is so I'll have an archive, and add just the accounts I need in the new file. My old file has a lot of old accounts closed for a long time - I'll never need that data again.

Doug Dubowski

Thanks for the replies. One thing that would make it a bit easier to keeping the file as is, is the ability to remove old accounts from pick lists within Quicken. I know you can hide accounts, but all the accounts within a particular data file seem to appear on any of the pick lists. If there was a way to stop those from appearing, the file would be much easier to use. Is that possible?

Thanks,

Doug

Chris_QPW

You could delete all of the accounts in your data file, and it won't get any smaller, at least with only doing that.

Creating records in a database is "costly" performance wise, so when you delete things, they don't actually delete the records, they just mark them deleted. The only process that will remove those records. Is Quicken's copy operation, which will also disable all your online services and so you will have to have to set them up again if you do that.

Deleting accounts generally means that you are deleting transfers too. That will leave the other side of the transfer with [Unspecified Account].

You can hide accounts in both the Account bar and account lists. In the Account bar they go to "More Accounts".

The big problem that everyone runs into though is that they think that hiding accounts will hide the transfers, it will not. The most you can do is add say ZZZ to the front of the account names so that they will be at the end of the category list.

The transfers are poorly implemented in my opinion.

I certainly get why they "overloaded" the category field with the transfers ([Other Account]), but then they turn around and include them in the category list, but not allow you to hide them like you can hide a category. Clearly to me a "transfer" is neither an account (so hiding the account shouldn't take it off of the transfer list), but it is also not a category, but you will find transfers in the category list. They probably should have had a transfer list, but since they are on the category list, they should have allowed the same ability to hide them there, but they purposely block that.