Opened up Quicken Mac Last Week - Missing Entries

Dale

I am missing some entries to several accounts that I track. This is frustrating because nothing balances or can be reconciled. Past reconciliations are erroneous. Just useless for me and the time it takes to reonstruct it takes days.

My first entry for Quicken was January 1994, and believe it or not, this is the first time that I've seen this. What causes this?

jacobs

It's impossible for anyone here to determine what caused your transactions to be lost. The most frequent culprit for missing transactions seems to be issues with the sync to Quicken cloud, although this is never acknowledged by Quicken. There's also user error; at times, we all swear we didn't change or delete something that we inadvertently/unknowingly did.

Generally, the best recourse is to restore from a recent backup of your data file, prior to when the entries were missing.

If you do not use Quicken cloud (e.g. mobile app or web interface), make sure your Sync to the cloud is turned OFF. This is in Settings > Mobile, Web & Alerts. If you do not need it, but it is currently on, do the following steps:

• Turn Sync OFF
• In Settings > Connected Services, click the Reset button for Quicken Cloud
• Restore (open) a backup data file.
• Immediately repeat the first two steps: turn Sync off and Reset Quicken Cloud

This should prevent any of your data from being store in Quicken Cloud, so there is no possibility for the Cloud data to erroneously overwrite your local data.

jacobs

It's impossible for anyone here to determine what caused your transactions to be lost. The most frequent culprit for missing transactions seems to be issues with the sync to Quicken cloud, although this is never acknowledged by Quicken. There's also user error; at times, we all swear we didn't change or delete something that we inadvertently/unknowingly did.

Generally, the best recourse is to restore from a recent backup of your data file, prior to when the entries were missing.

If you do not use Quicken cloud (e.g. mobile app or web interface), make sure your Sync to the cloud is turned OFF. This is in Settings > Mobile, Web & Alerts. If you do not need it, but it is currently on, do the following steps:

• Turn Sync OFF
• In Settings > Connected Services, click the Reset button for Quicken Cloud
• Restore (open) a backup data file.
• Immediately repeat the first two steps: turn Sync off and Reset Quicken Cloud

This should prevent any of your data from being store in Quicken Cloud, so there is no possibility for the Cloud data to erroneously overwrite your local data.

Dale

Don't know if this answered my question, but I did set the Quicken program to not Sync to the cloud. I do have a cloud account but I am a novice and never use it and I don't know how to use it.

The information that was lost was from several accounts mostly since the year 2020.

jacobs

Did you open a backup file from prior to the loss of transactions? Even though you have to do some work to catch up to the present, this is often less work than trying to determine what is missing, re-reconciling accounts, etc.

Dale

I didn't. I usually backup once a week and whenever an account has been reconciled. I back up to a thumb drive.

Just checked the thumb drive to see how many backups there are. I don't know what I'm looking at when the file was opened.

I had thought of your suggestion, but realize that the issue probably was a problem for about 2 weeks. Therefore I didn't want to use the most recent backup.

jacobs

I usually backup once a week and whenever an account has been reconciled. I back up to a thumb drive.

That's a manual backup, but Quicken creates backups automatically every time you quit Quicken. Unless you don't have backups going back far enough, that's typically a quick way to recover when you notice something has gone wrong in your data. (In Settings > Backup, I have the number of backups Quicken maintains set at 50, so I have a long string of backups should I need to jump back in time. (I also create manual backups periodically, so I have a long-term history of backups should I need to check something form 6 months or a year or more ago.)

Saving backups somewhere other than your computer's hard drive — like your thumb drive — is a good practice, as you want to be able to recover if your hard drive or computer suddenly dies. I have my Mac constantly doing backups to an external hard drive via Apple's built-in Time Machine software. I also make a complete hard drive backup to an external drive using SuperDuper! backup software every couple months. And I also use iDrive, which creates incremental daily backups in the Cloud, so I am protected if I have a calamity at my home. In my opinion, you can never have too many backups! 😀

Dale

Thanks. Wasn't aware of Quicken automatically making those backups. I'll look into that and, like you, set such backups at 50 myself.

BTW… I do have a Western Digital backup and another service that backs up for me as well.

Regards