Very slow closing down
I am using Moneydance Version 2017.7 (1661)
I have used Moneydance for several years, but over the last couple it has become painfully slow to close down and if one makes a mistake and needs to open it up again it is a dreadful waste of time. I wonder if this is because one can no longer archive old transactions so currently I have transactions back to 2011.
Secondly when I choose a new transaction and select the drop down box under the Cheque# heading, if for example I choose Trn it often puts DEP in the box, i.e. the one above. I am starting to feel that I need to get myself a new finance program but don't really want to. Any ideas to help my frustrations with Moneydance?
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1 Posted by jvspringrose on Apr 15, 2018 @ 03:25 PM
I've noticed this problem of slow closure, too. (Version 2017.7.1 (1671)). Have been exploring the possibility of archiving old data and removing from current file also, but have not found the way to do this yet, and not even sure this will fix the problem! Since I converted from Quicken to Moneydance years ago, I have loads of old transactions. (My md file size is 188.5 MB).
2 Posted by sth on Apr 15, 2018 @ 04:46 PM
Make sure that you have all your data on a local drive not a network attached drive.
I think that you can remove some of the MD internal sync files by turning file syncing on and back off occasionally.
3 Posted by jvspringrose on Apr 15, 2018 @ 06:09 PM
Thank you for your response. My file is on my iMac’s hard drive. I can put up with it for awhile, as it is not as bad a delay as others are describing.
Jim Springrose
[email blocked]
480-620-8993
4 Posted by julieleigh on Apr 15, 2018 @ 10:56 PM
My file is also on my MACs hard drive, not external.
Don't miss the other annoying "feature" of choosing the wrong cheque# heading as well.
5 Posted by julieleigh on Apr 24, 2018 @ 11:10 PM
I would have hoped to have been sent an answer by now? Does InfiniteKind no long care about its long term customers. I feel sure it is because there are so many transactions, if only I could archive it maybe back to the start of 2017 it might speed things up a bit. Can anyone give me an email address that is responded to?
6 Posted by julieleigh on Apr 24, 2018 @ 11:21 PM
By the way I have updated to the latest version (1671) and it is still just as slow closing down.
7 Posted by sth on Apr 25, 2018 @ 12:28 AM
Just a suggestion that has various success. I am going to guess that you had syncing turned on at some time in the past. This means that many many sync files are created and all these small transaction files cause slowdown in saving and backing up.
Try turning on syncing again. Wait some amount of time (10 min or so for the sync to complete.) Then turn sync off. This will remove the sync files (or at least copy them to the dropbox folder. It makes your MD data file smaller and removes thousands of files.
8 Posted by julieleigh on Apr 25, 2018 @ 01:45 AM
I have sync on all the time, we have just tried turning sync off and closing and opening Moneydance, then turning sync back on and waiting until it has finished syncing it still takes ages to close down. The back up file, btw is only 30.9mb
Julie
9 Posted by jvspringrose on Apr 25, 2018 @ 04:52 AM
sth:
Thank you for the suggestion. However, I have never synced, have not installed the Network Sync extension, nor ever installed any iPhone or iPad Moneydance apps on those respective devices.
Must be something else.
Jim Springrose
[email blocked]
480-620-8993
10 Posted by dwg on Apr 25, 2018 @ 05:35 AM
I'm a fellow user.
If you have your preferences set to backup on exit and are backing up to a network device you can suffer from slow exits, backups should be done to a local device and if desired moved to another device outside of Moneydance.
Easy test to determine of backups are involved is to turn them off and then try exiting the software and see how long it takes.
11 Posted by julieleigh on Apr 25, 2018 @ 05:40 AM
I mentioned on Post 4 that I am backing up on the hard drive of my MAC i.e. local so that isn't the issue in my case.
12 Posted by sth on Apr 25, 2018 @ 03:09 PM
Just a few comments;
It may more may not depend on if you have ever synced or not. If you are brave enough to look inside the bundle you can tell if there are thousands of transaction files. If so, that is your problem. It reduced the number of my files in that directory from about 7000 to 3. The slow down when quitting dropped from 1 min to about 10 seconds. My file size decreased from 670 MB to about 550 MB.
It is not an extension to install it is part of MD
DWG is right, the many many files internal to a MD Data set make any backup or use of the MD file over a network protocol slow.
13 Posted by julieleigh on Apr 25, 2018 @ 10:22 PM
Yesterday, following the email about syncing my husband turned off syncing, then shut Moneydance down, then reopened and turned on syncing, shut Moneydance down and it still took just as long.
Today, I did the same myself and now it appears to close down in under 15 seconds. Syncing is turned on again and it still closes down quickly. I am not sure what the difference was between what my husband did yesterday and what i did today….but whatever it WORKS thank you.
14 Posted by jvspringrose on Apr 25, 2018 @ 11:01 PM
Where do you turn on and off syncing? I haven’t found that in the menu(s)
Jim Springrose
[email blocked]
480-620-8993
15 Posted by julieleigh on Apr 25, 2018 @ 11:03 PM
Go to File, drop down the list and it is there underneath Passwords.
16 Posted by julieleigh on Apr 25, 2018 @ 11:07 PM
Having just gone back into it now to tell you where Syncing could be found, it was back to taking quite a long time when I exited!!!!
17 Posted by jvspringrose on Apr 25, 2018 @ 11:08 PM
Thanks. But Syncing is already turned off, it seems, and I seriously doubt it was ever on. Oh well!
Jim Springrose
[email blocked]
480-620-8993
18 Posted by julieleigh on Jun 25, 2018 @ 11:44 PM
I think I might have discovered one of the causes of the LONG LONG LONG delay when closing down that is making me think of looking for an alternative to Moneydance after all these years.
It could be "Reconciling". We also run a small Moneydance file for a social club that we are treasurer for. Up until last night it closed quickly, but I had suggested to my husband it was time he reconciled the various accounts contained within. He did so AND suddenly it was taking 4+ minutes to close down.
Now although we have pinpointed the cause of the slow down it is up to Infinite Kind to discover the cure.....and at the same time can we have a way of archiving off old accounts. PLEASE.
19 Posted by julieleigh on Jun 30, 2018 @ 04:17 AM
Thank you for the response sent as a private message. I have sent you the error log and await your answers.
20 Posted by Salmo on Jul 04, 2018 @ 01:48 AM
Same issue here.
I am backing up to a network share and for those suggesting to not backup to a network share, you kind of miss the point of backing up.
The only time I have not experienced slow backups is after the hard drive failed in my laptop. Thankfully, I was able to restore from my network backup but forgot to initially setup the backup location to be the share when I rebuilt the machine. Moneydance backed up fast locally, but horribly when I switched it back to the network.
Here's a suggestion for the developers - create a local temporary file, then simply copy that file to the backup location. My backup file is 27Mb and would take a few seconds to copy, but whatever process MD goes through to generate it's backup is horribly inefficient over a network.
21 Posted by derekkent23 on Jul 04, 2018 @ 07:01 AM
I am not support staff, just a user.
I use Dropbox as my backup location. As Dropbox, and other cloud storage system, have a local folder on your hard drive, which Moneydance save to and then the backup is copied to the cloud, its doing what you suggest. If you set a password in Moneydance your Moneydance backup file is AES256 encrypted with the key only help on your hard drive, not in the cloud so your data is safe.
Hope this helps.
22 Posted by sth on Jul 04, 2018 @ 10:15 PM
Both of these will be slow closing down. Backup to a location on the local disk. The point of these "backups" are to have some previous versions to roll back to in case of a corruption of the data file. They are not backups of your current data file. This is not the idea of backups in the common sense.
Use other software that is optimized for writing large numbers of files to backup storage to make true backups. I use Arq, duplicity and TimeMachine to backup to both offsite and local external Raid. Maybe a bit paranoid to have 4 different backups (actually two different local ones). But they run at odd hours of the morning and don't delay my use of MD. You should have an offsite true backup system and not the internal MD "keep 5 old copies" version.
23 Posted by derekkent23 on Jul 05, 2018 @ 07:31 AM
I am not support staff, just a user.
The backup created by Moneydance is simply a ZIP of your data set. So as far as I can see Moneydance is making a full backup of my data set.
There are dangers of simply making a backup of your data set outside Moneydance. For example, you are syncing. Something goes wrong. You want to fall back to a backup. So, you do whatever you need to do so Moneydance can open the data set. Syncing will restart and you could be back in problems. Part of the process when restoring a Moneydance backup is that syncing is automatically set to don’t sync. So, using an external backup requires further steps to prevent such issues.
For me a Moneydance backup takes seconds to back up to my Dropbox folder on my hard drive. Then Dropbox takes over and copies the backup to the cloud. I set the auto backup to store 10 backups, one for each day I open that data set.
24 Posted by sth on Jul 05, 2018 @ 12:57 PM
My point was that the auto backup folder is always an out of date version of your data set, ie one version behind. So it isn't really a "backup" of the current state of the file. Dropbox, iCloud, One folder etc. should do an async backup that does not slow down the quitting process.
However, these utilities can kick off as soon as MD starts creating files. A true backup system will run during idle time and not clog up CPU and/or network bandwidth during working hours (whatever your personal working hours are). Many older machines find that these backups can seriously impact performance.
25 Posted by derekkent23 on Jul 05, 2018 @ 01:53 PM
The Moneydance auto backup is made as Moneydance it shut down. That as up to date as you can get unless you try an external backup whilst the program is running and that does not sound like good practice.
26 Posted by julieleigh on Jul 06, 2018 @ 12:10 AM
Ian O, from Infinite Kind, has totally resolved my issue with Moneydance closing and taking SO long.
julieleigh closed this discussion on Jul 06, 2018 @ 12:10 AM.
sth re-opened this discussion on Jul 07, 2018 @ 04:09 PM
27 Posted by sth on Jul 07, 2018 @ 04:09 PM
Julie, can you share the solution with us?
28 Posted by julieleigh on Jul 07, 2018 @ 08:31 PM
Sent from my iPhone
> On 8 Jul 2018, at 2:09 am, sth <[email blocked]> wrote:
>
// Please reply above this line
==================================================
From: Ian O (Support staff)
Thanks for sending through your errlog.txt file Julie. It does seem to contain some strange activity relating the synching. I can see from your public thread that you have already attempted turning off syncing and then reenabling without any improvement.
Can you try completely resetting your syncing connection to see if this has any effect? This will involve disabling the current sync settings, deleting all trace of the sync from Dropbox, then setting up again from scratch -
First disable Dropbox syncing in Moneydance via File --> Syncing, then close Moneydance.
Using the Dropbox app or website interface, delete the .moneydancesync folder in your Dropbox folder.
Then re-open Moneydance and re-enable Dropbox syncing via File --> Syncing.
Sign out of Dropbox syncing on the Moneydance app on your mobile device and reconnect.
If you have any un-synced transactions on your mobile devices then this process will delete any transactions not stored in the main data set. You'll want to manually enter any transactions like this before following the steps.
Ian O
Infinite Kind Support
Sent from my iPhone
> On 8 Jul 2018, at 2:09 am, sth <[email blocked]> wrote:
>
// Please reply above this line
==================================================
From: Ian O (Support staff)
Thanks for sending through your errlog.txt file Julie. It does seem to contain some strange activity relating the synching. I can see from your public thread that you have already attempted turning off syncing and then reenabling without any improvement.
Can you try completely resetting your syncing connection to see if this has any effect? This will involve disabling the current sync settings, deleting all trace of the sync from Dropbox, then setting up again from scratch -
First disable Dropbox syncing in Moneydance via File --> Syncing, then close Moneydance.
Using the Dropbox app or website interface, delete the .moneydancesync folder in your Dropbox folder.
Then re-open Moneydance and re-enable Dropbox syncing via File --> Syncing.
Sign out of Dropbox syncing on the Moneydance app on your mobile device and reconnect.
If you have any un-synced transactions on your mobile devices then this process will delete any transactions not stored in the main data set. You'll want to manually enter any transactions like this before following the steps.
Ian O
Infinite Kind Support
System closed this discussion on Oct 06, 2018 @ 08:40 PM.