subscription to Quicken Mac Starter, cannot load 2007 data from iCloud, resource fork missing

kathiek
kathiek Quicken Mac Subscription Member
edited October 13 in Questions about using the Community?

I had a 2015 MacBook Pro with Mojave and was using Quicken 2007. Been using Quicken for YEARS!!! My MacBook Pro went kaput. Hard Drive is at a Data Recovery place and it's not going well. I got a replacement 2015 MacBook Pro with Mojave. I loaded my Quicken 2007 CD into my replacement MacBook 2015 with Mojave. There is a copy of the 2007 Quicken data file in my icloud. I try to open it and it says cannot load file. Today on my MacBook Air with Ventura (which I got for doing my taxes) I purchased Quicken Starter (a supervisor walked me through). We tried to upload my 2007 data from the icloud and it says Could Not Import "Data File" The resource fork is missing. Understand that the 2007 data file is 8.2 MB. My whole financial history is in that file. The data file is in my iCloud AND on my hard disk that is at the recovery place.

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Comments

  • Jon
    Jon Quicken Mac Subscription SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta

    Try renaming the file and giving it a ".qdfm" extension.

  • Richard Ancel
    Richard Ancel Member ✭✭

    Have there been any responses? I'm in exactly the same boat - all my financial data is in Quicken 2007, and I'm desperate to switch to a financial app compatible with my new Mac using Sequoia 15.6.1.

  • smayer97
    smayer97 Quicken Mac Other SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited September 10

    Have either of you tried adding the ".qdfm" extension to the name of your data file, as Jon pointed out? That is most often the cause of this error.

    The other possibility IS data corruption, which can and does happen IF you were using the data file directly off a a cloud location, or even if stored in the folder that is synced to the cloud location. A BIG unadvertised but well-known no-no on this forum.

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  • kathiek
    kathiek Quicken Mac Subscription Member

    I did try adding the .qdfm extension. It didn't help. It still says it won't load. The crazy thing is I decided to load it onto a thumb drive for some reason (can't remember) and I had a 2007 file on there called **KKP's finances. I clicked on it and it opened quicken with no problem BUT it's an old file. I had put a copy on the thumb drive back in spring 2018. My bank's statements I can access go back to 2019. So even if I try to re-create my 'checkbook' with the my personal categories, I am missing a chunk of 2018. AND I only have 18 months back where I can look at checks to see who I wrote one to or who wrote one to me. I am so disheartened. What I have lost is crucial…. goes WAY back! A friend told me to back up my laptop and I just never did. I don't even know where on the MacBook Pro 2015 the 2007 quicken data was stored. The fellow who is trying to recover my drive showed me how it's full of holes that haven't filled in. I signed up with Quicken Starter and it looks nothing like the 2007 interface.

  • John_in_NC
    John_in_NC Quicken Mac Subscription SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta
    edited September 13

    "Cannot load file" and not being to open the file because the resource fork is missing are two different errors. The former is sometimes recoverable from (such as adding the .qdfm extension and a few other tricks.) The latter error is almost always fatal.

    I will try to minimize the minutia, but Macs of the 80s/90s (from which Quicken 2007 got its DNA) relied on forked files to do great things for that era of computers. (In short, there were two parts to a file, unknown to the user.) The older Mac disk format supported this. Not all, but some programs such as Quicken kept data there.

    OSX knows how to disassemble and reassemble these hidden components behind the scenes on modern disk formats. Other disk formats/OSes aren't aware of forked files, and stripped the files apart, and the resource fork was lost when files it traversed different disk formats. And once that file (resource fork) is lost, it's gone. I suspect that has happened in your case.

    I do hope you copied your file from your flash drive to your Mac before you uploaded to the convertor-if you did from the flash drive itself it is still broken in two at that point.

    Perhaps you will get lucky with your data recovery service, and they have a way of preserving forked files. But, being that Macs haven't used them for roughly 25 years, the outlook might be bleak.

    I don't enjoy being the prophet of doom here, and I hope something magical happens so you get your data back. But, as a Mac user for almost 40 years, I, too, learned the hard way with some of my older files. Luckily my Quicken file is fine-and I started with 1.5 (released in '89). But, I steadily migrated to newer versions.

    Backing up is important as you now realize, but equally important is also keeping files in a usable modern format. I have been warning 2007 users for years that they really need to migrate to newer: 2007 was on life support back when it was released.

    Good luck, and if you have a partially usable file, you might stick with that and move on.

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