Quicken 2008: File Size Seems Much Smaller than Q05's

Why not, Intuit is throwing away features left and right! ;)

I thought this was an interesting topic so I checked my files. All my qdata files under '08 R2 are slightly smaller (perhaps by 1-2%) even after doing a week's worth of transactions.

Perhaps the drastic size difference was due to fragmentation. If you have the saved '07 pre-conversion file you could run a defrag and see if they shrink significantly.

Are you coming from Q07 to Q08? Mine was a conversion from Q05 to Q08. Maybe that explains the smaller change in your file size.

Dave

Possible explanation - did you do a Copy operation on your old file before the conversion - and convert the "copy"? - or did you just convert without the Copy operation?

QW's Copy operation flushes out any unlinked transactions in the file

- example - deleting a transaction does not remove it from the database. The deleted transaction remains, but is not linked. I suspect the conversion process may include cleaning up the old database - and result in a reduction in file size.

I periodically do a Copy operation on my file and usually note a reduction in size.

Nope. Just a straight conversion. The last Copy I did was back near the start of the year. Even if the size reduction is a temporary one from the conversion process, that's better than my last upgrade. Three years ago, when I went from Q03 to Q05, my primary data file increased from its original 16MB to a new 19MB. So going from 28MB to 17MB is a new and good thing.

Dave