Re: Quicken file size - should I reduce?

Hi all,

Having tried the archive operation one time many decades ago, I can say that 
I agree with everything in John's post.  There are many downsides to 
archiving and negligible benefits. I will add that it used to be common 
practice to put the default Quicken File in "My Documents" area which used 
to be a local file area.  Today, it is not uncommon on newer Windows PCs (eg 
running Windows 11) to place "My Documents" in the cloud (One Drive).  This 
can cause slower startups and exits of Quicken depending on whether the 
system needs to access the cloud or the cache is good enough. BTW, my 
Quicken file is 1.13 GB so you guys are working on relatively tiny files :-)

John

"John Pollard"  wrote in message 
news:[email protected]...

On 07/18/24 9:31 AM, JohnSmith wrote:
> Hi,
>
> My quicken data file is 118Meg.  Quicken is also starting to run a little
> slow (Via satallite internet).  I'm thinking about reducing the filesize
> to speed things up.  Any thought on this?

I recommend against the typical approach to reduce the size of your
file; namely "Archiving" data.

Your existing file is not that large - mine is 343mb and I have no
meaningful response time problems.


Quicken file size plays virtually no part in Quicken response time. And
I don't see how your Quicken file size coupled with your internet
connection speed could meaningfully affect anything except online-backups.

[Quicken only pulls data into the problem when it is needed. So, for
example, a user can have a huge Quicken data file, if the user has lots
of attachments. But attachments have no affect on Quicken response time
except when the user opens/views an attachment. Naturally that huge file
will take longer to backup, and take up much more of the usually limited
online backup space. But retaining valuable data should be more
important than backup time. I backup to my C: drive; then have various
Windows CMD files and other auto-backup software that copy the backups
on my C: drive to where ever I want them to be.]

Deleting Quicken data will leave you with less useful information, and
it is nearly impossible to merge archived Quicken data back with the
data from which it was archived - so you permanently lose the ability to
have Quicken compare older data to newer data; and it becomes much more
difficult to search your Quicken data once it resides in 2 or more files.

There are a couple of things you can do that MIGHT improve Quicken
response time, without giving up access to any historical Quicken data.

One of the slowest Quicken activities is processing investment data. Two
times that can happen is when you open a Home tab that displays any
widgets containing investment data, and when you process data in
investment accounts.

If Quicken opens to a Home tab widget that includes any investment data,
that can increase the time it takes for the user to gain operational
access to Quicken. That delay can be avoided by choosing a different
display (a display that does not include investment data) when Quicken
opens.

The newer releases of Quicken include the ability to "archive"
investment transactions. But in this context, "archive" does not mean
removing the investment data from the file: Quicken allows the user to
"move" ("archive") investment transactions from one Quicken account to
another. So if you have a lot of old investment transactions in a
Quicken account, you can move them to another account to, hopefully,
speed up processing (of that account).

As to file size per se, you can sometimes reduce the file size somewhat
without losing any data.

You can make a Quicken Copy (File > Copy or Backup file > Create a copy
or template. That process will remove any data in the file that was
"logically deleted". Typically, when you tell software to delete data in
a data base, the actual data remains but is marked as deleted: the
deleted data continues to take up space in the file, but the software
knows to treat that data as if it were not present.

In most cases the Quicken "Copy" is smaller (by some unpredictable
amount) than the original - but on occasion, the opposite has happened.

And there is one, temporary, drawback to making a Quicken Copy of your
data: the Copy will have NO accounts activated for downloading. The user
must re-activate all accounts in the Copied file (I recommend the "Add
Account" process for this).