Which of my data is stored on Quicken servers?

With the exception of Direct Connect, you can figure that pretty much any of the online services are going to store some information on the server. What exactly is store is never stated by Quicken Inc. For sure "some transactions" are stored on both the Quicken Inc servers and the Intuit servers for Express Web Connect and Express Web Connect + connect types. And of course there are things like Online Bills, Quicken Bill Manager, credit score, …

The financial institutions are starting to go to FDX (which means Express Web Connect + in Quicken) and Bank of America is one of the ones that have already changed over, from Direct Connect/QFX/QFX. Chase is another one that just did it. Capitol One did it first and log ago, Charles Schwab was the first investment financial institution to do it. Note I think Chase is the only one that did it so far for both banking and investment accounts.

And yes both #3 and #4 will have "some amount of transactions" stored on both the Quicken and the Intuit servers. Neither party tells the customers how long they will be kept there. I believe Intuit is more or less about a month and from what I can tell there isn't any reason to believe that Quicken's servers ever purge what they have downloaded. At least not without the user deleting their cloud data set.

Note that Quicken Mac calls the connection type Quicken Connect and doesn't have a separate desination when using the new standard on the Intuit to financial institution side. Also Quicken Mac doesn't import QIF files.

I think the main reason given might fall under "efficience", but because Quicken and Intuit aren't transparent about such things and because of "history" I think there are various reasons.

Let's start with the oldest history for Express Web Connect which to this day is still stated, but is clearly not true for some if not most financial institutions. If you look at this explantion from Quicken Inc on the connection types, under Express Web Connect it still says "Access and retrieval of data is automated through the use of nightly updates.":

https://www.quicken.com/support/how-quicken-connects-your-bank

As in, the original idea was that Intuit would log into the financial institution once a night, and retrieve the transactions, and store them on their server, and when you ran One Step Update on Quicken it would pick it up from there. There are still financial institutions that insist on this flow. And yes it is the financial institution that decides, the reasoning is that they don't want the Intuit/customers hitting up their servers all the time, especially during busy parts of the day. So, based on this Intuit did, and does keep a copy of your transactions (and the online balance) for some period of time. In the past it has been suggested that is about 30 days. Now this isn't true of most financial institution today and that can be proven by the fact that some of them are near realtime as far as posting the transactions for download, not to mention the use of multiple authentication. But I seriously doubt that Intuit makes any special changes to their "caching" system. And note that people have reported that the "nightly access" still goes on to this day (even if the financial institution is providing newer transactions in an One Step Update than would be possible with once a night).

Next comes this statement:

• Your financial data is stored on Quicken-hosted servers. This provides a more complete history of your financial transactions than is typical for data stored on bank's servers.

About three years ago Quicken Inc changed the flow of Express Web Connect (and now Express Web Connect +) It used to be Quicken (the program) → Intuit server → Financial institution's webserver. But they wanted visibility into this flow (at least that is what Quicken Inc told us). And it is now: Quicken (the program) → Quicken Cloud data set (the same one as Sync to Mobile/Web) Intuit server → Financial institution's webserver.

And so, transactions are clearly being stored in the Quicken Cloud dataset. For how long has never been stated, but my guess would be that they did the least amount of work to get this to work and it is basically Sync to Mobile/Web where they just tell the Quicken Cloud dataset not to allow access to the account using Mobile/Web GUIs. If you look at my link about QCS/Express Web Connect above it gives my reasoning of why I came to that conclusion. And the Sync to Mobile/Web policy on transactions can be stated as "sync two years, and from then on keep everything, unless Quicken Cloud dataset is deleted." At this point I have no reason to believe that the transactions downloaded by Express Web Connect/Express Web Connect + are treated any differently.

Now I just notice this for Quicken Mac:

• Quicken Connect in Quicken for Mac only: Quicken Connect is also a one-way connection between Quicken and the bank server, but does not use a scheduled aggregation system such as the Express Web Connect method. Also, login credentials are stored in the Mac Keychain, not in Quicken.

So, by this statement I the "nightly" part doesn't apply, but that doesn't mean that your transactions aren't being stored on Quicken servers. I remember reading in the Quicken Mac threads when they first changed over to the system that they are now using. The details are lost to history/my memory, but basically the way they accomplished the change over was to actually push all of the user's transactions up to the server, and then move them to the new server, then go from there. I remember there were some complaints about this, but in time people forgot about it. Bottom line is I beleive that Quicken Mac transactions always go through/are cached on the Quicken servers for Quicken Connect.

There is a "beta feature" that is on Quicken Mac that isn't on Quicken Windows. There is a bug that if the user buys Quicken and starts up by logging into the Quicken Web server, it will actually allow them to create accounts and such without first creating a Quicken Desktop data file and syncing. Several people have done this and then come to these forums asked how to connect that Quicken Cloud dataset to a Quicken Desktop data file. For Quicken Windows the answer is that it is impossible. What's more the moment they create a Quicken Desktop data file, they lose access to the Quicken Cloud dataset that they originally created.

For Quicken Mac they actually have this "beta feature", that allows them to create a Quicken Desktop data file from that Quicken Cloud data set (once) if they do it as the first step when dealing with Quicken Desktop. If they go off and start creating a new Quicken Desktop data file they too lose access to the original Quicken Cloud dataset.

But the real bottom line here is one can ignore all these technical details and just assume that yes your transactions will be cached on one or more servers and the only way to prevent that is not to use the service.

@MontanaKarl do you have the current URL for the CCPA link? I'm not sure where to find it.

I will note something that has come up about the too many "Quicken Cloud dataset" errors that people have reported. It has been stated that Quicken Inc can't just delete unused datasets because of some kind of legal requirements. To do it they have to be explictly told to do it. That is why when someone gets this error they have to contact Quicken support and tell them to delete the older dataset(s) so that they can create a new one. Note that datasets are created at times that people might not expect like during a restore they create a new one. Most likely because they can't really sync old data to a newer dataset.

Thanks @jl747.