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corrupt data files (Q Mac)

ppoole3

I have reported notstop problems almost every week for nine years, and now they are saying none of these are their fault, that it is because my data file has been corrupt every since migrating from quicken 2007 to the premium version. As best as I can determine from talking to quicken support and being a 40 year quicken user and switching to the premium version nine years ago, almost every data file in the world is probably corrupt. In other words, anytime, quicken crashes on its own, computer crashes, you have a power surge, etc etc it corrupt your data file and there's no way to recover from a corrupt data file unless you quit quicken every few seconds so it has a new backup because you can't predict when a crash or power surge is going to occur. I have spent hours on the phone with quicken support and they say once a quicken data file is corrupt you can't fix it. if you export/import into a new data file, it just carries the corruption into the new file. It would take me years to re-create a brand new data file from scratch with all the 1000's of transactions, custom categories, custom payees, custom renaming/quickfill rules, etc. feedback welcome

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jacobs

almost every data file in the world is probably corrupt. In other words, anytime, quicken crashes on its own, computer crashes, you have a power surge, etc etc it corrupt your data file

I'll disagree with both your assessments here. Most data files are not corrupt, or our computer sand our financial systems would cease to function reliably. Modern databases which use SQL, as Quicken does, are not corrupted by a program crash. That's because changes to data are made in such a way that if all the parts of the data change are not marked as completed ("committed"), the database rolls back to the previous stable state. This is a major part of why modern databases are significantly more reliable than the ones from earlier generations of the personal computing era (like Quicken Mac 2007).

once a quicken data file is corrupt you can't fix it.

It's very rare for a database to be corrupt, but that might be a true statement. That's why frequent backups should be an important part of every user's workflow.

if you export/import into a new data file, it just carries the corruption into the new file.

That's not true, or shouldn't be. I suppose it depends on what you're defining as "corruption" of the database. If you're talking about the indexes and relations of different records in the database, then creating a new database from exported transaction data will Not carry corruption forward into the new database. But if you're talking about actual transaction data which is wrong or missing, then exporting and importing will result in the same wrong transactions.

Since you've been fighting the problems for so long, I'm guessing you've tried this, but I'll just thro it out there: have you exported your Quicken Mac database to a Quicken Transfer File (QXF), and then created a new blank data file and importing the QXF file into it? This is generally the cure for any internal database corruption problems. I call it the "nuclear" option, because once you import your data into the new file, you will need to reconnect your accounts for downloading, recreate any saved reports, and recreate quick fill and renaming rules — but your transactions and categories should be completely intact, and that's a lot less work than starting from scratch. If you have done this and found the "corruption" is carried into the new file, I'll come back to what you are defining as corruption. If there was data which was incorrect at the time you converted from Quicken 2007, nothing is going to go back in time and correct that data.

I was a longtime Quicken Mac user, and I did have a few instances of corruption in Quicken 2007 and its predecessors. Some were easily rectified by rebuilding the account and transaction indexes, but I had one corruption event where a chunk of transactions in one date range were inexplicably changed to a different date range. I only discovered that more than a year after it happened, by opening backup files going back in time until I could pinpoint when it happened. The corruption was in a relatively unimportant account and the transactions were more than a decade old, so I never ended up fixing them (which I would have had to do one at a time). But that was a problem with the Quicken 2007 database. I haven't experienced, nor read about, people having similar experienced with the modern Quicken Mac.

ppoole3

Jacobs, thank you for your excellent reply; since we are both long time quicken users I'd like to keep this conversation going for a little while, ie back and forth. fyi I've been a mac user for 40 years and quicken for most of that.

if my data file is not corrupt, then there are a huge number of bugs in the program, which I won't list here for time's sake but maybe later.

"have you exported your Quicken Mac database to a Quicken Transfer File (QXF), and then created a new blank data file and importing the QXF file into it?" yes, and one of the results was that most of my memo/notes fields got replaced with more corruption, again don't have time now to explain.

jacobs

one of the results was that most of my memo/notes fields got replaced with more corruption, again don't have time now to explain.

Okay, I guess if you want to dig deeper, you can provide an explanation when you have time. I don't believe I've ever seen any user reports of exporting to QFX resulting in corrupted data. What exactly does "corruption" look like? Random character strings? Memos shuffled to wrong transactions? Is this data all correct in the current Quicken Mac data file (e.g. it show up correctly in registers and reports)? Or is what you're describing as corrupt data present in the current Quicken Mac file, and has been there since you migrated from Quicken 2007? As I said, if your data didn't import cleanly when you converted from Quicken 2007, nothing now can repair what was wrong 9 years ago.

There are some other troubleshooting steps which may or may not shed light on whatever issues you have, and what possible approach you might take to resolve. For instance, I'm thinking you'd want to select one account, export the transactions to a CSV file, and see what the data looks like. Are the Memo/Notes here "corrupted" or correct? If the CSV looks okay, you might try massaging the CSV file so it's in the precise format Quicken requires for importing a CSV file, and importing it to a new account. This is likely not a good long-term solution, since you'd loose your splits, and I'm not sure whether Transfers would import correctly (and if they did, whether they'd create duplicate transactions in the account on the other side of the transfer) — but it again might provide more insight into what's right and wrong with your data.

John_in_NC

What "bugs" or "corruption" are you experiencing? You haven't stated your problem(s).

As noted by @jacobs, database corruption is rare, and I have been using Macs/Quicken as long as you have. Something else is amiss.