data on other than C: drive

Question

I spoke the other day with a Quicken support rep to resolve a scary problem: a credit card register with a decade’s worth of transactions was displaying as having no transactions. Validating my Quicken file (File>Validate and Repair File…) fixed the problem, but during the conversation, the rep noted that my data file was stored on a drive other than my C: drive. He said that I was thereby risking data corruption. Note that the subject here has nothing to do with backup files - just the live QDF file.

After reading community threads about related issues, I suspect that the risk of corruption really exists only on a networked drive, and then only when multiple users are simultaneously accessing the data. However, I don’t want to ignore the risk if it is real.

I am running Quicken Classic Business & Personal under Windows 10, and the drive on which I am storing my Quicken data is a non-networked external Raid 1 enclosure. I am the sole Quicken user. Is my data really at risk because just because it’s not stored on the C: drive?

moboler · Answer

All interesting info. Appreciate all the time you took.

Have always used 2-line registers. And other than the one-time temporarily disappeared transactions, my QDF file has been on a USB-connected external Raid enclosure for a decade without any heart attacks. In the wake of the rep's advice, I moved the QDF file to the C: drive, but noticed no differences in behavior. However, given the non-deterministic / intermittent flavor of the architecture, I will at the very least be looking at any new Quicken hiccup with the architecture in mind.

Having worked as a programmer for 30 years, I'm well aware that complex systems are never 100% error-free. That's little consolation, however, when, as a user, your "mission critical" data suddenly disappears.

Thanks again!

Rocket J Squirrel · Answer

Quicken pre-dates external drives. When it was written decades ago, (after the floppy disk era, I should say) it expected that every disk write would be pretty much instantaneous to C:, and it writes to disk all the time after everything you do. USB is not as fast as, say, SATA. I'm not saying this is your particular issue, but with QWin, who knows?

This may sound unrelated, but do you use 1-line or 2-line registers? 1-line registers have a known  - but not at all understood - bug that causes QWin to write to disk every time you move the mouse pointer within a register.

You can't expect QWin to be bug-free; it's not. 2 things you can try is put your .QDF data file(s) on C: and use 2-line registers.

You also can't expect Quicken phone reps to be knowledgeable geniuses. You can take their advice or not.

moboler · Answer

One of the reasons for avoiding C: is lack of free space. The other is the redundancy of RAID. Not sure I understand the implications of "slower." Everything seems to behave normally, and I've been operating this way for 10 years. Other than support rep's comment, I have no indication that the register problem was caused by the drive.