Hi, Frank.
As we've explained at length several times in this newsgroup, there are three levels of backup in Quicken. Briefly:
- Automatic. Quicken does this with no notice to us, entirely behind the scenes, every 7 days, starting a week after we install the program. We can decide how many weeks' backups to keep; the default is 5, and after that, the oldest is deleted each week before the later ones' names are incremented by one (QDATA1.QDF becomes QDATA2.QDF, etc.) and the current file is backed up as C:\Quicken\BACKUP\QDATA1.QDF, etc.
- Reminded. Quicken reminds us (it doesn't "direct" us) to make a backup after every 3rd (default) time that we exit the program, if we haven't already made such a backup. The backup goes to wherever WE say: another file on our main hard drive, or to a different hard drive, or to a floppy disk, CD-R/RW, USB thumb drive...or wherever WE decide.
- Voluntary. Without any kind of reminder, we can simply backup our files at any time to wherever we choose. We should do these at certain mileposts, such as after all year-end entries have been made, and store these milepost backups away from the computer.
None of these backups are any help, of course, if they can't be restored - but you don't need a reminder of that at this point. :>(
The default settings for the first and second backups are set at Edit | Preferences | Quicken Program | Setup | Backup. The wording on that page is confusing to many users, as we've also discussed here. Intuit has had a decade or more to fix the confusion, but each year's program simply repeats the one before. The first box is to choose how often Quicken should remind us to make the second kind of backups. The second box is how many weeks' automatic backups Quicken should keep. We can change these defaults, but probably most users never do.
My own practice is to make voluntary backups at least once per session and often much more often. This is a habit that I formed back when computers and hard drives (and floppies) were much less reliable than now, and I often lost several entries when my computer spontaneously rebooted in the middle of a session. (For a long time, I would save after every check.) I seldom see the reminder when I exit the program, because I've already backed up at least once during the session. So I always have my latest voluntary backup to a separate place on my hard drive, in addition to Quicken's automatic backups. At least once a week, I also backup to a folder on a second physical hard drive, just in case the first one dies. And at least monthly, I also backup to a USB thumb drive which is stored separately from the computer. And now and then, I also burn a CD - but not as religiously as I should.
Quicken's backup-to-CD performance has varied over the past decade or so. For a while, I used Nero's InCD packet-writing system, and it worked pretty well. Then WinXP came along and, like you, I THOUGHT it was writing to the CD, but it was not. It was saving my file in a folder on my hard drive, READY to be written to CD, but the burn was not happening. When I realized what was going on, I wrote a small batch file to write those files to CD, but I didn't remember to run it very often. Recently, I've used a USB drive; it's much more convenient than CD for me, and I remember to do it more often.
None of that helps your current problem, though. About all I can suggest is what I've already said: try to use some file recovery tools to find at least one backup set that can be recovered from your old hard drive. But that is really just clutching at straws, especially if that hard drive has been used very much.
About all I can do is wish you good luck. :^{
RC