Full Quicken 05 restore issues with DOS formatted disks?

[Bible John]

I do not know if this is a question for the Mac experts, the Quicken
experts or the PC experts so I am posting to all these groups.

Okay for years I backed up my Quicken data to a Mac OS (HFS standard)
zip disk. But ever since moving to a laptop running OSX I have decided
to start backing up to a USB flash drive. For compatibility reasons I
formatted my flash disk as a DOS drive so it could be read in PC's.

I once read a thread in another board of a user that was having a very
hard time importing his old Eudora mail and settings from his old mac to
his new one via floppy or zip disk, because the disks were formatted as
DOS when the program only recognized Mac OS formatted floppies or zips.

I really hope that I do not have the same problem in the future with my
7 years of financial records in the rare event that Quicken 2005 crashes
on me. Or just to be safe should I reformat my flash disk as a mac OS
drive? I would lose the ability to use it on a PC.


Thanks,



John

 

[tacit]

I once read a thread in another board of a user that was having a very
hard time importing his old Eudora mail and settings from his old mac to
his new one via floppy or zip disk, because the disks were formatted as
DOS when the program only recognized Mac OS formatted floppies or zips.

I really hope that I do not have the same problem in the future with my
7 years of financial records in the rare event that Quicken 2005 crashes
on me. Or just to be safe should I reformat my flash disk as a mac OS
drive? I would lose the ability to use it on a PC.

It is not a problem to keep Mac files on a PC formatted disk; it is only
a problem if you try to copy files between two different Macs on a PC
formatted disk, and one Mac is using OS X and the other is not.

OS X and OS 9 store Mac-specific information, such as resource forks and
Finder metadata, differently on a PC disk. If you copy files onto a PC
disk using OS 9 (or OS 8), you may find that the information is not
readable by OS X and vice-versa.

 

[Lil' Dave]

I know nothing about MACs.
But, my financial data is saved in multiple media locations, 3 removable, 2
onboard, and passworded for access. I wrote a batch file copy so I wouldn't
have to do this 5 times in Quicken. Further, the onboard saves are part of
an image partition copy in case that is lost.
Every year or so you should also be archiving a year's worth of
transactions, then remove those transactions to reduce the total filesize.
Quicken is weak in multiple save locations and removing archived
transactions after a successful archive. Am using 2003 version.

 

[Shawn Hirn]

I do not know if this is a question for the Mac experts, the Quicken
experts or the PC experts so I am posting to all these groups.

Okay for years I backed up my Quicken data to a Mac OS (HFS standard)
zip disk. But ever since moving to a laptop running OSX I have decided
to start backing up to a USB flash drive. For compatibility reasons I
formatted my flash disk as a DOS drive so it could be read in PC's.

I once read a thread in another board of a user that was having a very
hard time importing his old Eudora mail and settings from his old mac to
his new one via floppy or zip disk, because the disks were formatted as
DOS when the program only recognized Mac OS formatted floppies or zips.

I really hope that I do not have the same problem in the future with my
7 years of financial records in the rare event that Quicken 2005 crashes
on me. Or just to be safe should I reformat my flash disk as a mac OS
drive? I would lose the ability to use it on a PC.

Just curious, but why bother keeping your Quicken data in DOS format? Do
you really use it on both a Windows laptop and your Mac? If you want to
do this, probably the best option would be to keep two backup copies:
one on an Mac formatted USB flash drive and another on a FAT formatted
USB flash drive. Considering how cheap these USB flash drives are
becoming, there isn't much of a reason not to do that.

If this were me, I would actually back up my data to an external
firewire drive. I personally think USB flash drives are too unreliable,
and too easy to lose. I would not trust my only backup to a USB flash
drive for any sort of data. Once every week or so, I simply use the disk
restore feature in Mac OS X's Disk Utilities to clone my hard drive to
another hard drive.

 

[Bible John]

Just curious, but why bother keeping your Quicken data in DOS format?

Its not in DOS format. Its thus using a DOS formatted flash drive,
which I have yet to get an answer it its okay for the Quicken mac file
if a disaster happened, but my guess would be yes.

Do

you really use it on both a Windows laptop and your Mac? If you want to
do this, probably the best option would be to keep two backup copies:
one on an Mac formatted USB flash drive and another on a FAT formatted
USB flash drive. Considering how cheap these USB flash drives are
becoming, there isn't much of a reason not to do that.

If this were me, I would actually back up my data to an external
firewire drive. I personally think USB flash drives are too unreliable,
and too easy to lose. I would not trust my only backup to a USB flash
drive for any sort of data. Once every week or so, I simply use the disk
restore feature in Mac OS X's Disk Utilities to clone my hard drive to
another hard drive.

I also do backup to an external USB 2.x drive, my FTP server, and the
flash disk. In the past I backed up to zip and floppy disks.


John

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