How to Back up or Restore Your Quicken Data

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Overview

When you back up your Quicken data, you preserve your financial information (including reports, passwords, accounts, and attachments). This is a way to safeguard your records in case of a computer mishap or as a way to move your data from one computer to another.

Please note, a Quicken data file has the extension .QDF while a Quicken backup file has the extension .QDF-Backup (or quicken.backup in Mac). 

Important: Quicken Cloud

Syncing to the Quicken Cloud does not create a backup; you can't restore Quicken data from the Quicken Cloud, and you can't access the Quicken Cloud from anywhere except the desktop and mobile Quicken products. A cloud backup is not automatically created when you back up your data file. However, the Subscription Release of Quicken includes 100GB of online storage with Dropbox that you can use for your Quicken backup files!

Instructions

Back up in Quicken for Mac

  1. Select File > Save a Backup...
  2. Choose a place on your Mac to save the file.
  3. Click Save. The Quicken backup file will have the extension .quicken2017backup or .quickenbackup.

Back up to a USB thumb drive, CD, DVD, etc.

  1. Select File > Save a Backup 
  2. Choose a place on your Mac to save the file. You can save to a flash drive by selecting it in the Where dropdown. It will be listed under Devices.
  3. Click Save and you're done!

Restore Quicken data

  1. In Quicken, select File > Restore from Backup...
  2. Browse your computer or external media to find the backup file you want to restore. The Quicken backup file has the extension .quicken2017backup or .quickenbackup.
  3. Select the file to restore.
  4. Click Choose.

Restore an automatic backup

Quicken creates a copy of your data every time you close the program and stores five of these copies in a BACKUP folder. If the backup file you've created becomes damaged, you may be able to restore an automatic backup and save yourself the need to reenter data.

Check to see if automatic backups are turned on (this is on by default)

  1. In Quicken, select Quicken > Settings.
  2. Go to the General tab.
  3. In the File backup section, make sure there is a check mark next to "Automatically backup data file...".
    • Under that option, there is a Backup Folder button that links directly to your BACKUP folder - a good way of finding them fast!

Restore an automatic backup

  1. In Quicken, select File > Restore from Backup...
  2. Select the Automatic Backups folder (Quicken > Backups > Automatic Backups).
  3. Select the file to restore.
  4. Click Choose.

Back up and Restore using Dropbox 

For backup instructions, see How do I backup my Quicken file using Dropbox on Mac?

For information on restoring data using Dropbox, see How do I restore backup files from Dropbox?

Troubleshooting

  • If you restore and open a backup file and the file is empty, you may have opened the wrong file. For help locating Quicken files, click here.
  • In order to move a backup file from Quicken for Mac to Quicken for Windows (or vice versa), you will first need to restore the backup file in the original program then convert it to the new one. For conversion steps, click here.  
  • After restoring a data file, you may be asked for a data file password. For more information about data file passwords, click here
  • For Dropbox errors, click here

 

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