how do changes to my register happen after I've reconciled, years past and months past

JKD

I reconciled my account on 1/11/25 to my bank statement, like I do every month, to $0. February statement time came and now I'm off by $1700! Quicken reconcile says Jan '25, Dec '24, Nov '23, April '23 are no longer reconciled, which add up to the $1700! Some items say revert, others say restore. I didn't delete them! What happened in updates between Jan and Feb this year! Driving me crazy trying to figure it all out. I dont want to just say "revert" or "restore" since I want to know what is going on!. Needless to say in late Jan. I thought, what is going on, I seem to have more money than I should, but I couldn't find what or where or why until I tried to reconcile Feb. 15.

Any ideas?!

Mac Sequoia 15.3.1

Quicken Classic Version 8.0.1 (Build 800.56243.100)

jacobs

I understand the appeal of having access to one's Quicken data on a phone, but I'm not willing to risk the integrity of my decades of accumulated data when I read of users having occasional data corruption similar to your experience. So I leave Sync off, religiously. I'm not sure if I'd ever have problems with it; I just know I haven't had the types of problems others describe running into occasionally.

If you decide you can do without the mobile app, I'd do this:

• In Settings > Mobile, Web & Alerts, turn Sync OFF
• In Settings > Connected Services, click the Cloud Reset button

This will wipe your existing data off Quicken's cloud servers.

• Restore a recent backup data file from before you experienced the problem.
• Immediately repeat the first two steps to turn Sync Off and reset your Cloud file

At this point, you should be safe from any cloud data corrupting/overwriting your desktop data.

jacobs

Yes, you can use an older backup; Quicken will update it to the current database format when you open it. But if you go back to a Mid-November backup, you’ll have to re-enter everything from the past three months.

Just remember to insure that Stn is off and that you reset your Cloud file immediately after restoring. Deleting the app from your phone doesn’t remove the data from Quicken’s cloud servers; only clicking Reset in Quicken Settings accomplishes that.

And yes, going forward, I strongly recommend setting the backups to keep at least 25, or even 50. Disk space is plentiful, so why skimp? Also, once a month or so, I manually generate a backup (on the File menu); it takes a couple seconds, and the ones created manually aren’t automatically deleted by Quicken over time, so I have backups going back a year or more. (Once every year or two, I go in and delete my oldest manual backups.)

And if you don’t already use your Mac’s built in Time Machine for backups, I strongly encourage that. All it requires is an external disk drive (a good quality 2 TB drives costs around $100); plug it in, turn on Time Machine in your Mac settings, and it will back up all the data on your disk drive — photos, downloads, documents, etc. — automatically. (Google Mac Time Machine to learn more.) Should I suddenly want to look at something in my Quicken data file from 6 months ago, I can find it in Time Machine and open it in just a few seconds. I can’t recommend Time Machine highly enough for every Mac user.

jacobs

@JKD I'm curious is you use Quicken Cloud; e.g. do you have "Sync" enabled so you can access your data with the mobile app or web interface? Numerous anecdotal reports from users point to data inexplicably being changed due to Quicken Cloud sync changing old transactions. (I do NOT have Sync enabled because of reading years of such reports.; to my knowledge, I have never had old transactions or reconciliations spontaneously change.)

It's likely you'll be able to recover by reverting to a backup going back a few days or weeks to before the reconciliations are off, and immediately turning off Sync and resetting your associated Cloud file.

JKD

thank you! I do occasionally use the app on my phone. When I checked today while using Quicken, I thought it said I was not syncing to the cloud, but I’ll check again. Thanks!

jacobs

I understand the appeal of having access to one's Quicken data on a phone, but I'm not willing to risk the integrity of my decades of accumulated data when I read of users having occasional data corruption similar to your experience. So I leave Sync off, religiously. I'm not sure if I'd ever have problems with it; I just know I haven't had the types of problems others describe running into occasionally.

If you decide you can do without the mobile app, I'd do this:

• In Settings > Mobile, Web & Alerts, turn Sync OFF
• In Settings > Connected Services, click the Cloud Reset button

This will wipe your existing data off Quicken's cloud servers.

• Restore a recent backup data file from before you experienced the problem.
• Immediately repeat the first two steps to turn Sync Off and reset your Cloud file

At this point, you should be safe from any cloud data corrupting/overwriting your desktop data.

JKD

I deleted the app and changed the settings. What this has taught me is I don’t believe I’m saving enough or long enough backups! I just changed that setting.
Can I use a backup that is pre update? My backup settings were on last 5 and that doesn’t get me back to Jan. 11, and the next one is 11/11/24 that I can see. Will that work?

Thank you so much for your help! I’ve been using quicken since the 90’s and this was making me rethink what I was going to do!

jacobs

Yes, you can use an older backup; Quicken will update it to the current database format when you open it. But if you go back to a Mid-November backup, you’ll have to re-enter everything from the past three months.

Just remember to insure that Stn is off and that you reset your Cloud file immediately after restoring. Deleting the app from your phone doesn’t remove the data from Quicken’s cloud servers; only clicking Reset in Quicken Settings accomplishes that.

And yes, going forward, I strongly recommend setting the backups to keep at least 25, or even 50. Disk space is plentiful, so why skimp? Also, once a month or so, I manually generate a backup (on the File menu); it takes a couple seconds, and the ones created manually aren’t automatically deleted by Quicken over time, so I have backups going back a year or more. (Once every year or two, I go in and delete my oldest manual backups.)

And if you don’t already use your Mac’s built in Time Machine for backups, I strongly encourage that. All it requires is an external disk drive (a good quality 2 TB drives costs around $100); plug it in, turn on Time Machine in your Mac settings, and it will back up all the data on your disk drive — photos, downloads, documents, etc. — automatically. (Google Mac Time Machine to learn more.) Should I suddenly want to look at something in my Quicken data file from 6 months ago, I can find it in Time Machine and open it in just a few seconds. I can’t recommend Time Machine highly enough for every Mac user.

JKD

thank you so very much!

I have used Time Machine but have gotten lazy about running it on a regular basis, thank you for the reminder. One never knows when something could happen to our computer!

Again, thank you so much for your invaluable knowledge!