Lost my Quicken data in power outage (darn it!)

[Brian Elfert]

I had a five second power blip during a storm last night. Apparently it corrupted my Quicken data file. I back up to Acronis Cloud every night, but none of the files from the cloud work either.

It appears I lost the past 15 years of financial history in Quicken. I figured I was protected by both backing up to an external hard drive and to the cloud every night. I guess I really need a new battery for my laptop or a UPS to survive these power events.

[Wade Lippman]

Why don't your backup files work? That doesn't make sense.
Perhaps it is actually the software that is corrupted.

[Lee Schierer]

Why don't your backup files work? That doesn't make sense.
Perhaps it is actually the software that is corrupted.

If you back up every night, then your back up file from the last time you used quicken should be available and all you would lose is the data you entered just before the power blip. I also suspect that your Quicken files are corrupt and reloading quicken should solve your problem.

[Brian Elfert]

It appears now the program itself may be corrupt. The problem is I have no idea where the install media is. There is no repair option in Programs and Features for Quicken. I might just have to buy Quicken 2015 to get it working again.

I thought Quicken was working because if I moved the data file it wouldn't crash anymore, but as soon as I hit the option to start a new file it crashed again.

[Brian Elfert]

I thought it was my data file that was corrupt, but it turned out that qw.exe was corrupt. (I had restored about ten different versions of my Quicken data file going all the way back to July 3rd.) I started looking at Windows event viewer which showed qw.exe was crashing.

[Richard McComas]

Not much help here but a battery back would have save you a lot of grief. I paid about 200 for mine and it's save me more that once.

[Brian Elfert]

Just having a working battery for my laptop would have saved me. If power was out a long time the laptop would hibernate when the battery got low. I bought a laptop, but I have only used it without battery maybe a dozen times. Being plugged in all the time fried the battery. I may just buy a desktop with a UPS for my next PC. If I get a desktop I will get a UPS with auto shutdown capabilities. You can find them as cheap as $45, but spending a little more is probably better.

[Larry Frank]

Your post reminds us to back up your data in two different places, do a system image file, and a UPS is a really good idea.

I have my computer on a UPS and with all the thunderstorms it is a good idea.

I had a friend who lost their hard drive. The data recovery company could get all the data back for a bit over e r $1500. This makes backing up seem like a real deal.