Q10 Backups

Posted by k@hotmail.com on November 3, 2009, 5:20 pm

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I'm using Q10 Home and Business and backing up to a USB drive. When I
make a backup, it creates a new file instead of overwriting the old
backup file which quickly fills up my USB drive. I then have to
manually delete the old backup files to make room. How can I set it
up to automatically overwrite the old backup?

Posted by John Pollard on November 3, 2009, 5:49 pm

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k@hotmail.com wrote:

> I'm using Q10 Home and Business and backing up to a USB drive. When I

> make a backup, it creates a new file instead of overwriting the old

> backup file which quickly fills up my USB drive. I then have to

> manually delete the old backup files to make room. How can I set it

> up to automatically overwrite the old backup?

I think you'll have to wait for a new release to come out; if I recall,
the procedure is due to be changed in the release due in December.

In the meantime, you could just use Windows Explorer to copy your .QDF
file to the appropriate backup folder.

--

John Pollard

Posted by charliech on November 3, 2009, 7:18 pm

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>k@hotmail.com wrote:

>> I'm using Q10 Home and Business and backing up to a USB drive. When I

>> make a backup, it creates a new file instead of overwriting the old

>> backup file which quickly fills up my USB drive. I then have to

>> manually delete the old backup files to make room. How can I set it

>> up to automatically overwrite the old backup?

>I think you'll have to wait for a new release to come out; if I recall,

>the procedure is due to be changed in the release due in December.

Where did you see the information that "this procedure is due to
change in the release due in December"? If they know the problem, why
can they not fix it now? I just looked at my backup USB drive and had
"tons" of backups on there.

Thanks for any insights!

>In the meantime, you could just use Windows Explorer to copy your .QDF

>file to the appropriate backup folder.

Posted by R. C. White on November 3, 2009, 11:05 pm

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Hi, John.

Why did Intuit make such a significant change with no notice to users?

As I have explained in past threads, my old habits die hard and I still make
"voluntary" backups several times each day, IN ADDITION TO the automatic
backups that Quicken makes. That was no problem when new backups overwrote
the old ones. But now, in just two weeks with Q10, my voluntary backup
folder already has 55 backups - at about 45 MB each - for a total of well
over 2 GB!

It seems that, once again, Quicken's developers must be working with only
their relatively small and static QDF model files and simply don't realize
what happens out here in the real world.

Simply restoring the option to overwrite the previous file of the same name
won't help, though. Q10 assigns each voluntary backup a NEW name, adding a
serial number to each file. So my next backup will be QDATA-56.QDF-backup,
and Q10 will not recognize that it is simply the later version of
QDATA-55.QDF-backup, so it won't overwrite the previous file - unless
Intuit's creative developers make the program smart enough to know that *56*
is a backup of *55*. So far, I don't have that much confidence in those
developers and programmers. :>(

I've not yet figured out the pattern on the automatic backups. Since
installing Q10D on 10/20/09 to replace Q09D, my BACKUP folder now has five
of those 45 MB backup files - with names like
QDATA-03Nov2009-17-09-17.QDF-backup - created on 10/26, 10/28, 10/31, 11/02
and 11/03/09. My setting for "Back up after running Quicken" is set to 5
times; I think the default was 3 times. So I suppose that if I run Q10 only
once per day, the automatic backups would be 5 days apart. But I often need
to close and restart Quicken during a day, such as when I shut down the
computer to run some errands, or when Windows Update requires a Restart.
Since my setting is to keep a maximum of 5 backup copies, I suppose that
explains why there are 5 files in BACKUP. Disk space usage now is
different, but it adds up to about the same total amount - but the earliest
automatic backup for me is only about a week old, not 5 weeks as it was in
the previous system.

If you have a chance, John, please tell the developers that this was one
part of Quicken that was NOT broken, so there was no need to fix it.
Rolling the whole fileset into the QDF file may or may not have been a good
idea; the jury is still out on that, I think. But messing up the backup
system was totally unnecessary!

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(Retired. No longer licensed to practice public accounting.)
rc@grandecom.net
Microsoft Windows MVP
(Using Quicken Deluxe 2010 and Windows Live Mail in Win7 x64)

> k@hotmail.com wrote:

>> I'm using Q10 Home and Business and backing up to a USB drive. When I

>> make a backup, it creates a new file instead of overwriting the old

>> backup file which quickly fills up my USB drive. I then have to

>> manually delete the old backup files to make room. How can I set it

>> up to automatically overwrite the old backup?

> I think you'll have to wait for a new release to come out; if I recall,

> the procedure is due to be changed in the release due in December.

> In the meantime, you could just use Windows Explorer to copy your .QDF

> file to the appropriate backup folder.

> --

> John Pollard

Posted by JimH on November 4, 2009, 12:51 am

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R. C. White wrote:

> Hi, John.

> Why did Intuit make such a significant change with no notice to users?

Karen's Replicator works really well. I've been using it for several
years to do my Quicken backup. It has plenty of options, so you can
perform backups however you like. Best of all, it is free.

http://www.karenware.com/powertools/ptreplicator.asp

--
Jim