Hi, Ray.
Once upon a time, in a galaxy far away...
I was an accountant. I kept books. BIG books! With pen and ink (remember
those?). Each year's books for one company might weigh 10 pounds. A set of
books for 20 years might outweigh me! To keep the physical labor of
handling those books manageable, we would "close" the books each year-end.
Then we would open a new, slimmer set of books for the new year. If we
needed to look back in 1970 to see what had happened in 1965, we had to -
first - FIND the 1965 binders, and then carry one from the vault to our
desk, open it - then take it back and get the other binder, the right one,
we hoped... You get the picture.
When I first started using Quicken - in 1990 - the situation was some
better. But still, with those floppy diskettes and even with the humongous
5 MB (yep, M! B) HDDs, it often took a good bit of disk shuffling to find
information from just a few years ago. Especially if we continued the
pen-and-ink model of closing our electronic books each year and creating an
annual archive, deleting prior years' data from our working file to make
room for the new year's transactions.
Finally, as disk drives grew, we could store 20 years' data in a single file
using only a tiny fraction of a hard disk. Nowadays, many (most?) of us
Quicken users like to keep ALL our financial history in our current working
file. My Quicken file has data back to 1990; its total size is a little
over 50 MB now. That's, let's see, 1.6667e-4 of that 300 GB HDD. (I don't
read scientific notation very well, but that's a very small fraction!) Even
with a dozen backups, there's plenty of room. So I don't feel a strong urge
to remove enough data from the file to save disk space. And, I don't notice
any slowdown in performance, sp that doesn't motivate me to shrink the file,
either.
What does motivate me - to keep the data intact and at hand - is the ability
to look back and see that I paid $71.88 for the local phone company to
install my telephone on November 13, 1990, including the first month's
service.
I think I recall trying to archive the first year or two of my Quicken data,
but haven't tried it since. I know the option is still there in the 2010
program (File | File Operations | Year-end Copy), but I have no interest in
using it. But I don't mind if Intuit leaves it there for those who want it.
RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(Retired. No longer licensed to practice public accounting.)
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
(Using Quicken Deluxe 2010 and Windows Live Mail in Win7 x64)
"Ray" wrote in message
a long time Quicken user --just some personal accounts... nothing
elaborate...
.. just wanted to know what is the purpose of Archiving Quicken Data
files...
I backup on a weekly basis or when needed.. can't see the need for it... am
I
missing something.. thanx
