Quicken Data File Size
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I have been using Quicken for a long time and like to keep my historical transaction record. My file size has been getting really large. Is there any way to strip out some of the data but maintain account entries. For example, can I save monthly security prices and not daily ones?
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I have transactions that go back to my early days of "DOS" Quicken and, generally, my file is fairly responsive even though it reports its size at 150453K. (Click {Ctrl}-About Quicken simultaneously.) One thing to try is to click on File > File Operations > Copy... and then use the copy as your active file. That method is considered a way to "straight up" a Quicken file, eliminating some of the garbage that may have accumulated in the data base.
You didn't indicate why you were concerned with file size. Is Quicken sluggish? Are you running out of disk space? Is the file too big to back up?
How big is your QDF file?
My file is 135MB. It's more of an issue when trying to back-up something of that size. I'm going to try the "file copy" operation to see how that goes. Thank you everyone for your suggestions.
Like Goodloe White my issue with it is the way it impacts the backup size and the amount of storage you need to hold them.
FWIW: my data file is much larger than 135 MB, and I haven't observed any performance issues.
If you are curious, you can file the QDF file structure using a zip tool.
But they are also stored there in Windows' encrypted file system.
Your account can read them, but no other account can.
7-Zip can open the QDF file, which is in fact a compressed file containing all the old files that were in Quicken in 2009 and below.
A while ago I stripped out all of my attachments. I really wasn't using them, and my data file had grown to 500MB so you won't see any attachments below, but if you do have them they will in a folder called Attach. Note in the newest version of Quicken there is an option in the copy that allows you not to copy the attachments.
The .QPH is the security prices.
What you would get in this case is I believe two months of daily, then it switches weekly I think for about a year, and then monthly, but no more than 5 years total.
How did you go about stripping out the attachments?
If you are using the latest version of Quicken they have added this:
File -> File Operations -> Copy...
But in fact that isn't how I first stripped out my attachments.
And it brings up something I forgot to mention, don't try to use 7-Zip make changes to the QDF file, it won't work.
The way I stripped out my attachments is by using 7-Zip and extracting all the file except the Attach folder, and then used a trick to put them back together.
If you rename those files from .IDX to MyFile.IDX, and the same for all the other files.
And then open the MyFile.QDF in Quicken it will think it is an older data file, and it will put them back into one compressed QDF file.
The one drawback of this method is that the links in Quicken will not go away, and if you click on them you will get an error, and you will also get a warning during a file copy that it can copy the attachments.
With this new feature in copy though you can clean that up.
(and people say they aren't improving Quicken at all. :-) )
You would have to of course extract the Attach folder, and then you have to put all the folders under it under a folder named the same as above.
Like:
Attach\MyFile\...
MyFile.IDX
MyFile.QIF
...
I tend to discourage the "delete price history" option unless it definitively cures a known problem in a specific users datafile. In such a case, there can be other ways to recover more of the deleted prices, if necessary.
I was only trying out these transaction level attachments for a short period of time, they're all in my checking register. From using the 7-Zip utility I learned I have precisely 131 of them. Afterwards I realized I could just sort my register by attachments to locate and delete all of them manually, if I really want to be anal about it.
My data file is very small, only 72k, including the attachments, so I think I'm better off leaving well enough alone.
That was a very interesting discussion, thanks!
It was necessary to do a file operations copy to reclaim all the space, now my data file is down to a mere 58k.
For someone with a large number of attachments to delete, that new Copy File option you pointed out, might be the one reason to upgrade.
A new empty data file is more than 58KB.