Need method to convert old QFM 2007 data file to current QMac (edit)

Dave in SF

I have been a Quicken user since the first QFM came out decades ago. In more recent years, I used Quicken 2007 for years before finally (and happily) moving to the new QFM, now Quicken Classic, a few years ago. I'm using the most recent version which is 7.6.1.

I suddenly have a need to access data from an old QFM 2007 file. I manage a small entity that now uses QuickBooks but for a few years, more than a decade ago, used Quicken. I need to access some of that old data, and I have the data file, but I no longer have the ability to run QFM 2007. I'd like to convert the data file to Quicken Classic so that I continue to have access to the information it contains.

But when I try to convert the file using Quicken Cloud, it fails with the message "An error occurred while preparing the file to be imported."

Has anyone done one of these file conversions recently, and can anyone confirm that the Quicken Cloud conversion is working? I found an old discussion from a couple years ago where people were having the exact same problem I'm having, and it turned out that something had been broken on Quicken's end and that no conversions were working. So I'm wondering if a similar problem could have occurred and maybe this is something that Quicken can fix?

I'm pretty desperate to be able to access my data, as I'm going to have to go through a very laborious process of trying to reconstruct finances from bank statements if I can't convert the file.

Help!

Quicken Kristina

Hello @Dave in SF,

To assist with this problem, I checked on our end to see if there are any known issues with the cloud conversion tool. I'm not seeing any open tickets.

Do you have multiple copies of that file, or another backup of that file with similar information? If so, please see if any of those files will convert. Doing this will help determine if it's a file issue or an issue with the conversion tool itself.

To start looking into this on our end, I forwarded the issue to the proper channels to be further investigated. Please navigate to Help > Report a problem and submit a problem report with log files attached and (if you are willing) a sanitized copy of your data file in order to contribute to the investigation.

While you will not receive a response through this submission, these reports will help our teams in further investigating the issue. The more problem reports we receive, the better.

We apologize for any inconvenience!

Thank you.    

Dave in SF

I will try to find another copy of the file, not sure if I have another one or not. And I will submit a problem report as you suggest. So far I have not been able to import the file.

jacobs

It may depend on how that Quicken 2007 data file was moved around. For instance, if it was copied to a flash drive which was formatted as MS-DOS/Fat 16, then it lost part of the data file and probably won't be able to be opened/converted.

Ps56k2

just following along -

how does copying a Mac file to a FAT formatted drive lose part of the file ?

Jon

It's because of the way data was stored in files in the HFS disk format. HFS files had at least two forks - a data fork which held the main data for the file, and a resource fork which would hold associated data. For example, a document might have text in the data fork & embedded images in the resource fork. Other forks could also be created. The FAT file system didn't have a similar concept, so if you copied such a file to a FAT formatted disk only the data fork would get copied over, the other forks would get left behind because there was no place to put that data.

Ps56k2

wow - so anyone using a MAC has to be aware or careful or ?? when copying files from a Mac to a portable drive ?

How do you handle this situation - and say copy files from a MAC to a PC ?

Jon

It's not something I ever worried much about TBH (not that I can recall, anyway). Forks were mainly a thing back in the pre-OS X days; Mac OS X had other ways of solving that problem (bundles) but continued to support forks for backward compatibility reasons and apps like Quicken 2007 that never got properly updated for OS X still used them. Apple officially deprecated their use over a decade ago & from what I've read recent versions of the OS have had issues with them.

Regardless, any file I would have been likely to copy to a PC wouldn't have had much in a resource fork anyway - something that's platform independent like a PDF, jpg, or mp3 was going to be just fine. If I did want to transport something Mac specific via a FAT or NTFS disk I would just zip it first but I mostly just reformatted external drives to something Mac native.

Dave in SF

Thank you again for your help. I did find another copy of the file, and I did successfully import it. So it turns out that the first file must have been corrupted somehow.

Thank you for pointing me in the right direction!

jacobs

@Dave in SF Yay! I'm glad you were able to find a copy of the old file which imported successfully.