Best practice for purging old data

Jay Gourley

I've used Quicken for 20 years or more. So I have dozens of ancient accounts that, in a perfect world, would have no lingering effect on my financial activity, balances, net worth, etc. I don't delete those accounts out of fear of consequences.

I'm not afraid of consequences that are immediately apparent. I can make a backup, delete old accounts, then restore if the deletions cause an obvious problem. The eventuality that stops me is deleterious affect that's not discovered until weeks or months later when reconstructing the intervening activity would be impractical or impossible.

So I'd like to understand more about what happens when accounts are deleted. What are the pitfalls? How are transfers with remaining accounts handled when one half of the transfer is a deleted account. I need a more thorough understanding of the risks in order to proceed with what seems like a dangerous process.

This post is designated in registers & transactions because it does not fall neatly into any of the Quicken Classic for Windows subcategories.

NotACPA

Best Practice is: DON'T. The size of your Q data file has almost no impact upon performance. And, once done, it's almost impossible to "put Humpty together again".

And any impact upon Investment accounts (where old/closed positions CAN impact the account performance) can be mitigated by Archiving old transactions. The Investment Archive function can be accessed via the GEAR icon in the upper right of the investment register.

AS WITH any function of this type, take a backup first … just in case.