Another Quicken Year End/Archive Problem

What is your criteria for determining when a program has frozen?

In my experience, the Quicken "copy" function has always appeared to stop when it is somewhere between 60% and 80% complete ... but it eventually finishes, if I wait long enough. I haven't used a stopwatch, but I believe the apparent stop has grown longer as my fileset size has increased.

Just stabs in the dark: what type accounts are those that do not get copied? How many transactions in the smallest one? Hhow many transactions in the largest account that does get copied? Does the price history file (QDATA.qph) get copied ... completely?

I am concluding that the Q program is freezing because the progress bar goes rapidly to about 50% (half way across) and stops. I have let it run for 20 minutes, 30 minutes and an hour thinking that perhaps it was still copying. It doesn't matter how long I leave it on because each time I am still missing the same three accounts. Every time I try it the window freezes and I cannot minimize or exit. The only way out is by executing CTRL-ALT-DEL which brings up the "program is not responding" message and I have to close from the CPU Usage window.

The three accounts that do not copy are all investment accounts. They have been reconciled and have no uncleared entries. I have a total of thirteen investment accounts and only those three don't copy. Of the three one has 10 entries, one has 12 entries, and one has 234 entries. The largest account that does copy is also an investment account and contains 1,872 entries. I know that there are some intricacies pertaining to investment accounts and archive and new year but nothing that I can think of that would prevent them from copying.

No, I am not getting a QDATA.qph file. However, I do have the price history for all of the other accounts. I get QDATA.qdf and QDATA.qsd files. And everything else in my file copies without incident.

Thank you for your reply and I hope that you can make something of this. John R.

I'm still taking stabs in the dark, but I asked about the price history because it is a file that contains all your price history, and nothing but price history ... and it can get corrupted ... and, to the best of my knowledge, Quicken's "Validate" has never found any corruption in the price history file. Often when the price history file gets corrupted, it causes Quicken to "freeze".

Try renaming QDATA.qph, then attempting your "copy" (Quicken will create a new, empty, price history file when you open your QDATA fileset to do the copy). If the copy succeeds, your price history is probably corrupted. You can recover old prices by: downloading price history in Quicken, downloading .csv files from Yahoo (or others) and importing prices into Quicken, or manually re-entering. (There is one other possible way, but it is cumbersome, and only worth considering if the other three options don't suit).

Which QDATA file are you suggesting that I rename QDATA.qph? I have QDATA files with extensions .qsd, .qdf, .qmd and .qel but I don't have any with extension .qph in my Quicken 2000 or from earlier programs. Could it be that the .qdf extension is the product of a later version of Quicken than the one I'm using?

I should throw out that I have used Quicken since 1991 and have gone trough a number of versions over the years. All of my investment files for years prior to 2000 were converted from older versions to Q2000 format when I began using Q2000. I am still bringing forward all of the investment data from the old converted files all the way back to

1991 when I copy/archive without any problems. The three investment accounts that don't copy were added with Quicken 2000. Since I don't have a QDATA.qph file I assume that the price history is in QDATA.qsd.

I would just like to come up with a simple solution and move on, if possible. I have spent nearly 20 hours trying to resolve this, but I am willing to try your suggestion to rename QDATA.qph if you can explain it to me further.

Or, do you have an opinion re. my idea to just begin a New Year, starting 1/1/2006 and leave the current file as it is without archiving or ever changing it again? I don't have a problem with the Start New Year execution. I have done practice runs starting a new year with each of the past five years and that works. I just can't get an archive copy to include those three investment accounts.

I realize that I won't be able to do comparison reports if I don't have an archived file but I'll just have to live with that until a time when I upgrade to a newer version of Quicken which might bring the data forward for me.

I could archive without those three accounts being there and adjust my comparison reports in the future to offset them, but I wonder if that might cause problems in the future when I convert to a newer version of Quicken. I don't want to move into a new version of Quicken until I feel safe with this problem.

I really do appreciate the attention that you have given to this. Any suggestions that you have will be considered. It just may be that I'll have to start a new year and move on and hope that it works out down the line.

That should be: Could it be that the .qph extension is the porduct of a later version of Quicken than the one I'm using?

So Sorry...

Yes.

Please excuse me; I was not paying close enough attention. I am having a harder and harder time relating to earlier versions of Quicken, even to noticing that a poster is using such a version. Sorry for that.

You won't have a .qph file; they did not come into being until Q2001 (or possibly Q2002). And I consider them to be a significant benefit, because they can be deleted and recreated to get rid of any corruption they may contain.

The fact that you do not have a separate price history file however, does not mean that the problem does not lie in your price history.

You can attempt to accomplish the result I suggested by searching through your price history to see if you can visually discover one, or more, corrupted price history records. I do recall that there could be invalid dates in the price history - and usually they would appear at the beginning of the price history, though I would not count on that. (Anything in the price history record that is not kosher should be cause for concern, not just the date).

You won't be able to do comparison reports even if you do have an archive file; Quicken provides no method to reintroduce archived data into existing Quicken data or to include archived data in current Quicken data reports. (Unless you were just planning to produce reports from different files and compare the printed results).

Newer versions of Quicken can convert archived Quicken files (and backup files, and "copy" files) as accurately as they can convert your "current" Quicken file ... but you must specifically tell Quicken to make such conversions, if you expect the newer version of Quicken to open the older data files. Still, it is not of much use if there is no way to include the data in archived files with the data in current files ... and there isn't.

That is why some of us do not ever intend to remove anything from our Quicken data ... unless absolutely forced to do so.

Yes, I assumed that was what you meant, see my previous reply.

I suggest you plan to keep a permanent backup of your Quicken data - all your Quicken data - at the end of every year. You may want to pay enough attention to them to have a *copy* of each backup converted to your latest Quicken version as you find the time. Whenever you feel really comfortable about the correctness of your more current yearly backups, you could begin to delete the oldest ones.

I do keep two backup copies of all years of my data all the way back to

1991 on Iomega ZIP discs which I keep in a fire-safe box and I will continue to keep my backups current. The backup copies are not corrupted in any manner and I am comfortable with them.

I'm glad you brought that to my attention---my mind had not gone there yet. I feel better thinking that I can use the backups if I must to convert my data over to a newer version of Quicken when I upgrade.

You're correct about the comparision reports. That's why I wanted to include as many years as I could in the archived file so that I could do manual comparisons. I think that what I had in mind when I wrote that was the ability of Quicken to retain investment data in the new file regardless of how old the data is.

While all other transactions, except for investments and uncleared transactions are not retained in a new file, having investments retained does allow me to look back over all years and compare investment income, which is really the most important comparison that I care to make.

I think for now that I will just rename my current file "Years 2000 through 2005" and password protect it and start a New Year as of

1/1/06. At least this will reduce the time that it takes me to backup and I won't have to be concerned about losing data from those years. I will also have the backup disks which I plan to burn onto CD's at some point.

Thanks again for your time and attention. It's easy to get so involved in something like this that it consumes me and takes my time away from other things. Hope you have a good day. John

I believe this is not unlimited, however. In other words, your backup must be reasonably close (whatever that means) to the current version of Q. for example, Quicken backups from 1998 might not be convertable to the newest version. I'm not sure of the details, I'm sure John or someone else will give some specifics. My point is you might wish to convert your backups that you store to the current version every once in a while to keep them roughly in tune with the current release.

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be a good read.