QDATA File Too Big?

Intuit's statement is, IMHO, an overly pessimistic statement. You'll see reports here of *tons* of us with account files larger than yours. I'm currently at 22MB. What they are doing is basically covering their ass.

*ANY* database will have a larger chance of corruption the bigger the database gets. That is the nature of databases. If you go to more industrial strength databases with features like transaction logging, you get better protection against corruption, but no guarantee.

Corruption can happen for a lot of reasons. Most of them have nothing to do with Q. Bad memory, hard drives, cache memory, etc..Keeping the size small is, IMNSHO, like frequent defragging of the hard drive. Will it help? Sure. Will it be significant? Nope. The only protection you have for corruption is a good, solid backup strategy and up to date documentation/reports. Every time I use Q (I'm also a decade+ user at Q05), I back it up before I exit. The backup goes into a date labeled directory.

Back about 2003, I had trouble with a 32MB file in Q2000 H&B. There were numerous repeated recoveries and retries trying to make it work, but no matter how many validations done, or how many data file copies done, it was still very clear that adding 3 more records would crash it every time then. I had to reduce the size of the data. I feel sure there are many unknown factors responsible, but that was my case.

I'm using Q2005 H&B now, and I have a 46MB file, with no sign of trouble at all (but a fast RAID disk helps). I dont know if it might become a problem later, but no problem is visible yet. My file is large due to many thousands of entries in a H&B Invoice account.

I wish there were a way to remove early records from only one huge account instead of as is, requiring date truncation of every account. Deleting transfers now removes the transaction in both accounts instead of just one. Removing both without date cutoff in all accounts would affect the dollars, so they solve this with a date cutoff in all accounts, to not affect the dollars.

I not an accountant, but it would seem that in this case, if truncating only one account were possible, and if the affected early transfer transactions on the second side could be retained and automatically recorded as simple external deposits/withdrawals in the remaining account (instead of transfer transactions deleted from both sides) then the dollars would remain correct, with only the source details removed.

This is the main feature I would like to see added to Quicken. The ability to see prior years is useless if we must remove the prior years to make it work.

And another point that Hank did not mention because it might have sounded too obvious: Make sure that your backup is on a second drive, (not just a second partition of your primary drive). If you can, backup to another computer on your network.

Regards, Chad

Thanks for everyones' advice and comments.

Regarding frequent backups: This was the frustrating part -- I had TWO separate backup files to go to when the master QDATA file on my hard drive went flaky. One was a recent backup on a CD-RW disk, and the second was a permanent backup (although about a month old) on a CD-R. Both backup files were corrupt -- which didn't make a lot of sense to me so I figured that the Quicken application itself was causing the problem. But after uninstalling and reinstalling the Quicken application twice, and installing the available Quicken "patches" from their website, I was never able to get Quicken to recoginze any of the backup files. That's when I finally gave up and called tech support.

Some days the software gods just seem set against you....

You may want to consider backing up more often. Having only 2 backups is a bit too thin for my comfort level.

You should also consider, if you are not already doing so, maintaining some of those backups offsite. You can have 50 backups, but if they are stored in the same location as your primary computer and there is a disaster at that site, then they won't do you much good.

Steve