Archiving [Year End Archive for Q Mac]

UKR said:

If there ever is a Year End Archive feature for Q Mac, my recommendation for using it would be:
Keep at least the last 4 or 5 complete years and this year's data in the active data file. Archive only what's older than that.
This way, last year's tax information and any other long term history (well, sort of long term) and trend views and graphs remain available without having to switch files.
Using Quicken for Windows, in years past I archived older data every year. Occasionally it has been necessary to search thru this multitude of archive files to find some historic information ... on these occasions, how I have wished for a program to correctly "put all these humpty dumptys back together again".

That will be the very next requested feature after they get a year end archive feature (to put it back together, or in some cases searching multiple databases).

I can tell you it is much easier to separate out data then it is to put it back together.  That is the reason that why Quicken Windows has never got such a feature.

And what’s more the archiving of data almost never achieves what the people are looking for.  Quicken Windows doesn’t archive investment transactions because of the complexity of dealing with security lots and such.  And that is about the only section in Quicken Windows that might have an performance improvement if it was in this feature.

But even that I doubt.  From what I can see the performance bottleneck for investment accounts in Quicken is more about the GUI and the way the do the calculations than the database itself.  So, just breaking up an investment account into store closed lots in another account that isn’t used much is the best performance tweak one can do.
To give an example of what I mean by the database not being the problem. They have newer functions the allow editing multiple investment transactions or move them to another account.  It does this almost instantaneously even for thousands of transactions.  It does this completely in the background where the GUI doesn’t get in the way.

Yes, people report performance problems in Quicken Windows, but almost never does it have to with the size of the data file.  Most are about the number of securities/lots/transactions in a given investment account or some unexplained corruption or something.

I have never split my data file in Quicken Windows and I have never had any performance problems.

smayer97 said:

Quicken Windows has 2 types of archiving...a year end feature and an archive feature. It has been a while siince I looked into this and the comparative features.

My understanding is that the former allows doing a one year split of the data to be separated from the main data whereas the latter allows splitting and merging a year or more into a separate file, which can be added to by doing more "archiving" of data, such that there is one main data file and one archive file at all times.

Please confirm if this is correct or clarify.

EDIT, for typos, and to add some details.

 No "merging" has ever been implemented.  People that use year end archiving or copy are creating separate data files.  Merging these files back into their main file is next to impossible.

I was going to reference the FAQ on this (which goes on for pages), but when I click on the link it does open.  Maybe it will open for a SuperUser, it is near the end of this page:
FAQ: Quicken Windows FAQ List — Quicken

Above is about carefully preparing categories, and other such lists, and doing a QIF export/import.
the QIF format doesn't have syntax for a lot what is in a Quicken data file and as such depending on what is in the data file might not be correct.  For instance, if there is any open options they will be wrong since there isn't any syntax for matching the security lots.  Also Quicken is terrible at handling the transfers.

At the file level there is creating a copy and year-end:


Copy is more "destructive".  You can tell it not to include uncleared transaction, investment transactions, and attachments.  But you start removing the investment transactions you are most likely not going to like the results as it rips security lots apart.  It also breaks all connections to any online services.



Year-end is a "misnomer", the data isn't restricted to a year-end.


The rules that it uses, trip up people all the time, and they are always complaining that it doesn't work.
The transactions have to be reconciled on both side of transactions if they are transfers, and it doesn't touch investment accounts.

Recently they added an "Archive Transactions" to the functions for accounts, which moves all the closed security lots to another account.  This does help with performance in the first account because Quicken Windows performs badly in accounts that have lots of security lots and transactions.  And it works because Quicken only loads the accounts one opens.