I'm on sabbatical and want to use Quicken on my laptop. Following instructions from Quicken and this forum, before I left I backed up my data to a flash drive. Then I restored the backup from the thumb drive to the laptop. All seemed accurate until I went to update: Quicken downloaded transactions from 2005 in my stock accounts. What am I doing wrong? What can I do to fix this? Thanks, Don
I think the problem is you missed two files that keep track of your updates. If your quicken file is named Budget, the two files you need are BudgetOFXLOG.DAT and the other is named BudgetOFXOLD.DAT. Take a look in the directory where you keep your quicken budget and you'll see these two files have very a recent date the corresponds with the last on-line update.
I'm pretty sure those are *just* log files; reporting what happened after the fact, not controlling what does happen.
Don, was this a fresh install on the laptop? Quicken keeps temporary files that are used during downloading transactions. I move back and forth between a desktop and a laptop. Everything works OK, except downloads sometimes pick up duplicate transactions. That is because of the temporary Quicken files that are not part of the backup.
If it isn't a fresh install, I'd recommend deleting the directory "C:\documents and settings\All Users\Application Data\Intuit\Quicken". This is where Quicken keeps the temporary files. If you are nervous about deleting it, just rename it to old_quicken. Then, install Quicken, but on the installation choices, select "repair". This will create a new clean directory structure to replace the one you deleted.
I've had problems with web connect downloads that corrupt something. When the corruption occurs, Quicken won't run. I've used this procedure several times, and it helped each time.
Hope this helps.
That changes my concept of how Quicken keeps track of the last download session. I'd be interested learning more about how this actually happens since I've been including these two files in my regular backups.
My guess is that there may be two factors involved: date/time of last download and (which is a financial institution created transaction id that is intended to be unique for all your transactions for that account for all time ... I believe).
But I think your idea of saving the OFXlogs isn't a bad idea; they should contain the OFX representation of all transactions that were downloaded (including that for every transaction). They could be useful for debugging purposes. I don't know if there is any way to re-access the ".DAT" file, but if you "Save" the OFX log from every download, you will get the OFXlog.txt file ... and that is easily reviewed in any word processor. That would be the file I would save.
Quicken help tells me it is probably a problem involving corrupt data in the backup file. Without access to my desktop the only solution is to download and then delete any duplicate entries. With all the accounts I have I'm wondering if I want to spend my sabbatical doing this or wait until I get back to my desktop at home.
When I asked the help technician what I could do to fix the corrupt data file, he referred me to this:
--Don
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