Quicken data corruption and 2011 end-of-life

Quicken 2011 has an ongoing problem with randomly losing data from stock quotes. The symptom is that one or more of your securities suddenly has zero value. All of the price history is gone and Quicken won’t download any new quotes for it and it won’t let you manually update any of the price history.

Later in article, I’ll show you how to recover your data, even if you no longer can download quotes.

It’s been written about many times on the Intuit message boards, and has been since 2011. Intuit’s solution to this, like most issues, is to tell you to upgrade to a new version of Quicken. This bug fix, of course, isn’t free. Often the new product is more bloated with useless features that Intuit is trying to sell you. And to really make you glad you upgraded it sometimes removes features that actually were useful. Those can sometimes be restored by moving up to the next higher type of Quicken, but it will cost you a little more.

Intuit to the rescrew

Partial solutions have been offered By Intuit, but they only restore a partial price history, and the history only goes back for a maximum of 5 year. One more minor detail: if the stock is no longer listed, for instance if the company was sold, you’re SOL because there is no place to download the quotes.

I may have encountered this data loss a long time ago, but not noticed. If you’re not actively tracking a stock, or don’t currently own any shares, it’s easy to miss that the share price has dropped to 0.

I’m sure this is a coincidence, but recently it happened to a stock that I was holding. And then it happened to another and I started having to try to find out what was going on. Why is it a coincidence?

End of life

On April 1, 2014, the version called Quicken 2011 will no longer be able to download quotes or access any online data. This gives me a bit of a dilemma because I have heard a lot of horror stories about the migration of 2011 data, shall we say, not going smoothly. I don’t dare update until my taxes are done. (Great timing on the planned obsolescence date, Intuit.) But I digress. This migration failure is often blamed (as has happened in past versions) on the Quicken database being corrupted before the upgrade was done. Sorry, there’s nothing that can be done to help you, better luck next time.

To keep using Quicken for anything more than a glorified spreadsheet you’ll have to upgrade. If there’s a problem with you’re database, you’ll likely lose data. Intuit will tell you that you are very important as a customer, however you have somehow managed to corrupt the data and it’s your fault and you’ll never see your data again, but really you are important!

The bottom line is that even if you don’t think you have a data problem you’ll probably want to go through the first few steps of the repair process to look for corrupted data. I have no idea if the fix that is described here will work on Q14. Quicken has changed its database format in the past, so there’s no reason to think that they won’t do it again.

The data loss problem is solvable, and it turns out that the loss isn’t as bad as expected. It’s just very time consuming and a PITA, so I don’t want to do it to only then have the data become lost again. Buying the new version fixes (supposedly) that problem, but then there’s the potential data loss from doing an upgrade, and I can’t risk that until my taxes are done, etc. And once again, I digress.

The fix

Okay, this is why you’re really here.

The bad news is that each security needs to be fixed individually. The good news is that the data still exists and it is current. By that I mean that even though the quotes appear to be gone and you can’t update them, Quicken has still been doing updates behind the scenes. It just doesn’t want you to know about it.

The main tool needed is called QPH File Processor, and it is from www.reltan.com/pages_main/qph_main.html. It has been recommended on Intuit’s community self-service support for many years. It seems like it has recovered a lot of data for a lot of people. Get it, and follow the website’s installation instructions. Another program needed (at least for Windows users) is “7-Zip”. It seems to be one of the few archive programs that can decompress Quicken’s backup file.

This post is already too long, so I’m not going to cover every detail of every step. There are loads of places that will tell you how to do common things like backup up your file. So get started:

  • Do a data backup from Quicken to create a .QDF file. Know where you’re backing it up to because this is the file you’ll start the repair with.
  • Using 7-Zip, do 7-Zip→Open archive→*
    to get access to the QPH data in the .QDF (or .QDF-backup) file.
  • Right-click on the .QPH file, then use Copy To…, and save it in the same location as the .QDF file.
  • Open the .QPH file with the QPH File Processor program
  • Under Data extraction options select All price and volume data.
    Keep the Include Quicken-compatible CSV… checked.
  • Under Output options deselect Omit any securities containing “\”
  • Click Process source file to create the -AllData.csv and -AllData.txt files.
  • The -AllData.csv file has the data that will be imported to Quicken, but it needs to be done one security at a time. Open the file in any
    text editor, such as Notepad or EditPad. Bad securities will have a price of 0 and a date of “0/255/55”. The txt file will show a date of “255-Jan-2155”
  • Search for “0/255/55” to find the securities with (probably) bad data. Select all of the data associated with the ticker you want to restore. Copy and paste it in a new file.
  • In the new file, delete the first line because it has the damaged date. Save the file as a .csv file. I used the ticker name,
    for example msft.csv, to make it easy to find.
  • If you only have one bad security you can close the text editor at this point. If there are more to do, keep it open so you can repeat the csv exporting process.
  • In the Quicken menu, go to Tools→Security List (CTRL-Y), then find the damaged security and click on it.
  • In the new window’s menu click on “Edit Security Details“. Change the ticker to a symbol that is not used. (I add xxx to the end so it will be easy later to revert to the original symbol.) Don’t forget the original symbol because you’ll be using it again.
    Click OK. In the popup window, select only the option to delete quotes. This does not affect the transactions, only the historical prices.
  • Click OK, wait for it to finish. Restore the original ticker by repeating the previous step but using
    the security’s its original symbol.
  • At this point you can optionally select Update→Download Historical Prices. If you do, choose
    only this one stock to update. The display should update with stock’s history for 5 years. This verifies that the symbol was restored and that Quicken can once again download its prices.
  • Go to main Quicen menu “File→File Import→Import security prices from CSV file…“. Browse to the CSV file you created and click OK. (You’re probably doing this because you have a long, detailed price history, so don’t be surprised if it looks like Quicken has stopped responding.) Eventually there will be a message saying that the prices were imported. The full price history should now exist. Remember that there is no volume information available to import, so you’ll only have that for the last 5 years from using Quicken’s download price history.

Congratulations, you’ve worked around another bug that Intuit could have easily fixed, or provided a tool to fix, years ago.