Why did my Quicken Mac data file triple in size within a few days?

Mike Johnson

thanks for the helpful post. When I do this I see that I have a number of catalogs labeled "conflicted" they go back to last year.

They account for a lot of the file size. Can I delete them?

I also found if I turn off encryption the loads and quits are very fast but the backup takes the time.

Mike

Jon

Are you storing your file on Dropbox? That seems to be the source of “conflicted copy” files. If so, you should stop doing that; it’s ok to save backups to the cloud but your main data file should not be.

Mike Johnson

Yes.

can I just remove the conflicted files without messing up something else?

thanks,

mike

[Edited - Language]

Jon

I don’t know if you can just delete those files; I would be hesitant to go messing around inside the Quicken file. If you’re going to do that, make a copy of your file first in case it doesn’t work out. I would suggest making a backup of your file from within Quicken and then restoring from that backup to a new file & seeing if that gets rid of the extra stuff.

Mike Johnson

Thanks for the thoughts. Here is what I did:

Currently, I am using dropbox for my Quicken files. Mainly because I also access Q on my laptop fairly frequently.

So, 1. Copied the master Q file from dropbox and pasted in a folder on my Mac Studio hard drive.

2. Made another copy in the same folder to use for experiments.

3. Opened that copy in Q to verify it was OK.

4. Closed out of Q and opened the file to see the packages. (right click>show package contents)

5. Deleted the conflicted files in the package.

6. Reopened the adjusted Q file and it appeared to be fine. File ("data" in the package) size went from 3.5 gigs to 200 megs.

I believe (or wonder if) the conflicted files inside the Q master came about when I tried to open Q on the laptop before dropbox had finished synching between the studio and laptop.

Will post here if problems reoccur.

Thanks again for the tips.

Mike

MontanaKarl

@Mike Johnson as @Jon said, you should not (as in "never") use Dropbox or any cloud service to store your active Quicken file. As with many other apps that I use, this is not only not supported (you've seen the 'conflicted' subfile creation) - but can potentially lead to corruption. Quicken is not a multi-user app. You can copy the file from one machine to the other, or even access it over a local network (as long as two machines don't try to access at the same time), but otherwise there is no way to avoid the issue you've seen if you continue to use cloud storage as the 'home' for your data file.

Setting your preferences to save your backups in Dropbox or other cloud storage is, however, recommended.

Mike Johnson

Here is where i am at.

I have a dropbox folder on my macstudio harddrive. It synchs with dropbox.

I also have a dropbox folder on my mbpro. dropbox synchs to it.

as long as I wait until dropbox synch is complete before opening qucken on the other computer everything works. File size is the same. transaction count is the same and all accounts reconcile to their external sources, like banks, credit cards and investments.

This is the same procedure I have followed for years. Quicken information goes back to 1995.

I think what happened to me is last year I opened quicken too quickly between machines causing the conflicted catalogs in the data base package. This made the file way larger, things slowed way down and I started this search.

Thanks to all who have added their thoughts.