I'll pass along some ideas for your Quicken data history

I have discovered that now that I'm older my investment, debt and asset records are of more interest than my detailed spending data from 1986, and with this my data organization needs have changed.

I currently have annual files from 1986 through 2015 ( current 10 years ). A number of years ago I did discover that I wanted my entire investment history in my current file, and over time have managed to fairly well accomplish that goal. However, I now have the individual annual files with much duplicated data carried forward. And this has probably resulted in varying data due to adjustments and corrections. Plus this results in much duplicated data volume in annual files for all accounts that are carried forward, i.e. debt, asset, investment.

What I wish is that I had instead accumulated my spending data in one file and my net worth (debt, asset and investment) data in another file.

I have earlier expressed my unpopular feelings regarding file size and performance issues, as a result of having been a programmer and database designer/administrator for 42 years. My solution has been to design and develop my own system of exporting my Quicken data, then formatting and merging it and importing it to a relational database system (Microsoft SQL Server). That has facilitated the ability to manipulate my data far more effectively.

What I would wish now to have is a single storage system for the spending data and a single storage system for the investment/asset/investment history.

Another thing I had done that will undoubtedly also be unpopular is to suggest to our federal representatives that they enact legislation that would require software development companies to give us complete and unfettered access to OUR data and any related analytical data that is stored in THEIR systems. This would be accomplished via requiring that OUR data be available in usable format directly by independent existing database systems and programming languages independent of any specific vendor software.

Through my career I used and developed systems based on various database systems and various programming languages and we NEVER captured, developed, and stored data that was not accessible to other systems.