Quicken Online Backup: How to Back Up Quicken, Backup File Location and How to Restore a Quicken Backup File

No. Quicken Online Backup stopped accepting new sign-ups and renewals after March 1, 2017, and the service is absent from Quicken's current backup documentation. Quicken now writes a local backup file and leaves the off-site copy to you, with Dropbox storage included in the subscription to make that step painless.

This is why searching for "Quicken online backup" turns up so much confusing material. Pages written before 2017 describe a paid Quicken service that no longer exists, pages written after it describe Dropbox, and a third group describes Quicken Cloud sync, which is not a backup at all. If you are looking for a hosted service with a Quicken logo on it, there is nothing to sign up for. The modern answer is a local backup plus a cloud folder you already own.

On Windows, choose File > Copy or Backup File, select Create a complete backup, click Next, then click Create Backup. On Mac, choose File > Save a Backup, pick a location and click Save Backup. Both write a single self-contained file you can copy anywhere.

On Windows there is a checkbox to add the date to the backup file name. Turn it on. Without it, you end up with a folder of files whose only distinguishing feature is a timestamp you have to hover over, and when you are trying to find the last good copy of a file that went wrong three weeks ago, that matters. Dated file names also make it obvious at a glance when a backup routine quietly stopped running.

By default Quicken for Windows writes backups to C:\Users\[your name]\Documents\Quicken\BACKUP, with the extension .QDF-backup. Quicken for Mac saves to the location you choose when you run the backup, using the .quickenbackup extension. Older Mac backups may carry .quicken2017backup instead.

The default location has one obvious weakness: it sits on the same drive as the file it is protecting. That covers you if you corrupt the data file or delete an account by mistake, and covers you not at all if the drive dies. Changing the destination to an external drive or a synced cloud folder takes one dialog box and is the single most useful change most Quicken users can make to their backup setup.

On both Windows and Mac, choose File > View/Restore Backups, select the backup you want, and confirm. Windows then asks whether to overwrite your current file or create a copy. Choose the copy. Overwriting is irreversible, and if the backup turns out to be older or more damaged than you thought, you have nothing left to compare against.

Worth knowing: Quicken's own troubleshooting guidance puts restoring a backup first in the list of things to try on a damaged file, ahead of the repair utilities. That runs against most people's instinct, which is to try to fix the file in front of them. If you have a backup from before the problem started, using it is faster and safer than repairing anything.

Yes. Quicken for Windows creates an automatic backup every seven days, and Quicken for Mac creates one every time you close the program. Both keep five of these copies by default, deleting the oldest as new ones arrive. You do not have to do anything to enable it.

Five copies sounds like plenty until you do the arithmetic. On Windows, five weekly backups is roughly five weeks of history, and on Mac five copies might only cover five sessions, which for a daily user is under a week. Any problem you do not notice quickly, a category that got mangled in March or a duplicate import from two months ago, will have aged out of the automatic set long before you find it. Automatic backups handle recent accidents. They are not an archive.

No. Quicken states it directly: "Syncing to the Quicken Cloud does not create a backup; you can't restore Quicken data from the Quicken Cloud." Cloud sync exists to push a subset of your data to the mobile and web apps. It is not a copy of your data file and there is no path from it back to a working Quicken file.

This is probably the most expensive misunderstanding in the Quicken ecosystem. If you have been syncing to mobile for years and have never run a backup, you do not have a backup. Check the backup folder before you assume otherwise.

Run a normal backup and point the destination at a Dropbox folder on your machine. On Windows that is File > Copy or Backup File > Create a complete backup, then change the location to your Dropbox folder before clicking Create Backup. Dropbox uploads it like any other file. The subscription includes 100GB of Dropbox storage you can use for this.

One caution that applies to Dropbox, OneDrive and Google Drive equally: back up into the synced folder, but do not keep your live working data file there. A sync client that decides to update a file Quicken has open, or that tries to reconcile two versions edited on two machines, is a reliable way to damage a data file. Keep the working file local and let the cloud folder hold finished backups only.

Almost always the destination is the problem, not the file. The most common causes are an external drive that is no longer plugged in, a cloud folder that was renamed or moved, a path pointing at a mapped network drive that did not reconnect, and folder permissions that changed after a Windows update or a new user profile.

If you see a message about being unable to open the source file, that points the other way, at the data file itself being locked or damaged. Close Quicken completely, make a copy of the data file in File Explorer or Finder, and try backing up the copy. If the copy backs up cleanly and the original does not, you are dealing with a damaged file rather than a backup setting, and the repair route is covered in our guide to running Quicken validate and repair on a corrupted file.

A .QDF-backup is a compressed snapshot of a Quicken for Windows data file, and only Quicken can open it. There is no third party utility that converts a .QDF or .QDF-backup into a spreadsheet, a QuickBooks file or anything else. The same is true of Mac's .quickenbackup.

That limitation is structural rather than a gap in the market. These are proprietary database files, and the only program that reliably understands the format is the one that wrote it. Which is why every serious answer to "how do I protect my financial history" ends up in the same place: keep the backup for Quicken, and keep a separate export in a format that outlives it.

Try a backup first. Quicken's published order for a damaged file is to restore a backup made before the damage, then copy the file, then run File > Validate and Repair File. Quicken also advises validating "only if you're experiencing problems with your data and not as a regular practice," so it is not routine maintenance.

Validate and Repair is a Windows feature. Mac has no equivalent menu item, which surprises people who follow a Windows tutorial and cannot find the option. The full procedure, including Super Validate, what the repair log actually tells you and what Mac users should do instead, is in our walkthrough of Quicken validate and repair.

Export it. On Quicken for Windows, File > File Export > QIF file writes a plain text ledger you can read in a text editor and import into other software. Quicken for Mac has had no QIF export since Quicken Mac 2007, so Mac users export a CSV of the register or a report instead. Either way you end up with a file that does not depend on a subscription.

QIF has one significant limitation on the way back in: Quicken's own QIF import only handles asset, liability and cash accounts, so a QIF is a better archive than it is a round trip. The practical steps are in our guide to exporting a QIF file from Quicken, and if the destination is accounting software rather than a spreadsheet, the converter at the top of this page turns that QIF into a balanced QBO file that QuickBooks imports through Web Connect. That path is covered in detail on converting Quicken to QuickBooks.

If you are still deciding whether to stay on Quicken at all, the two questions that usually settle it are what happens to your file when the subscription lapses and whether the newer Quicken products keep a local file at all. Both are covered in what happens to your data when a Quicken subscription expires and Quicken Simplifi versus Quicken Classic, where the short version is that Simplifi has no data file to back up in the first place.

Turn on dated backup file names, move the backup destination off the machine that holds the working file, and stop treating Quicken Cloud sync as protection, because it is not. That covers the ordinary disasters. Then, once a year, export a QIF or CSV and keep it somewhere boring, because that is the only copy that will still be readable if Quicken is not part of your setup five years from now.