Backup (Online & Offline)

William Day

I recently launched Mac Quicken and immediately set the date on one of my investment accounts to 12/31/2024 (the current date was 01/11/2025) so that i could gather 2024 year end information. I then quit Quicken. Quicken took a offline backup and an online backup.

Were the backups that were taken of the 12/31/2024 version of the data or the 01/11/2025 version of the data?

Jon

Changing the date on one of the dashboards or portfolio views doesn't delete anything from the file. The entire file gets backed up, so all the data as of today would be included.

MontanaKarl

They would be of the 1/11/2025 data. I don't know what you mean by setting the date in your account… but any backup is of all data in the current data file.

If you need a year end data file for some reason (all of that data is still present today)… you could use Time Machine (assuming you have that set up on your Mac, as everyone really should) to restore your data file (to a new name - do not overwrite the current file!!) as of January 1, assumming you did an update on that date to get the 12/31/24 quotes downloaded….and then back that up. But I'm not sure what the purpose of that vs today's data would be.

Jon

@MontanaKarl I assumed they meant they changed the "Data as of" date somewhere to get year-end values.

MontanaKarl

If what you're saying is that you want to see your portfolio data as of 12/31/24, and perhaps export it to CSV/Excel to keep a record of it, then in the Portfolio tab, select 12/31/24 like this:

which will display all values as of that date (assuming you had downloaded those quotes)… you can choose any date at any time here … and then to export, click the 3 dots icon on the far right like this:

and chose to export to a CSV file, or Copy (for pasting into Excel)… either a summary of all lots… or the full detail for every basis lot. Saving that file will give you a permanent year-end record (which your brokerage statement should also provide)… but is not a backup as the data can never be restored from this file.

William Day

Yes … the only thing that I did was to change the "Date As Of" to view the investment values s of 12/31/2024 and then quit Quicken.

Which brings up another interesting question: Since no data was altered (added, changed or deleted) why were backups even taken? The data was only viewed and experience has shown me that when I open Quicken to view information and then quit, no backups were taken.

jacobs

Were the backups that were taken of the 12/31/2024 version of the data or the 01/11/2025 version of the data?

Just to clarify, there is only one "version" of your data. Your data file contains all data that has been entered into it, and is backed up in its entirety every time you back up.

Setting the "As of" date in an Investment account Portfolio view is simply a filter to display your data for that account as of that date. It's no different than setting a date range for a report. Setting a date only affects what you are viewing at the moment; it does not actually affect your data at all.

William Day

Thanks everyone …. it just seemed strange that backups were taken when the base data wasn't altered.

Jon

@William Day If you had not opened your file since close of business yesterday, Quicken would have downloaded updated prices for your investments & that could have triggered the backup.

jacobs

it just seemed strange that backups were taken when the base data wasn't altered.

If you just switched which account you were viewing, that gets recorded in the data file so Quicken will re-open on the same screen next time you launch it. So while no transactions may have changed, changing the account or the Portfolio settings would have been enough to trigger a backup when you quit.