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Any way to speed up backups?

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mcmnky

30 Dec, 2018 02:10 AM

Hello,

I'd like to save a backup file when exiting Moneydance, but the process takes entirely too long. I just timed the process--over 12 minutes to create a moneydancearchive file of about 90MB.

I'm on version 2017.4 (build 1624) on Windows 10, and saving the backup to a NAS on the LAN.

Thanks.

1. 1 Posted by dwg on 30 Dec, 2018 02:17 AM

   

   I'm fellow user.

   Set Moneydance's backup to a local disk then copy the created backup to your NAS yourself.

   Trying to create an archive containing many small files over a network is going to be slow at best

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2. 2 Posted by JFG on 31 Dec, 2018 02:05 PM

   

   If your Moneydancearchive file is 90MB, you can probably speed things up significantly by deleting old .TXN files. In my case, it reduced my backup file from over 100MB to just over 12MB. Besides reducing backup/exit time, it also reduces startup-time.

   To do so, this is what I do...

   Make sure you have a backup of your MD files, 'just in case' (although this has never gone wrong for me).

   Start and exit MD twice, without making any changes. This makes sure MD has processed all TXN files. Then, without MD running, go to the directory where your TXN's are stored: C:\Users\USERNAME\.moneydance\Documents\MDFILENAME.moneydance\safe\tiksync\out

   where USERNAME is your Windows login-name, and MDFILENAME is the name of the MD file which you are using (and trying to backup).

   MOVE the contents of the directory to another (temporary) location. The directory should now be empty. Start MD and check if the last transaction you entered is present. If so, you're done, and you and delete the TXN's you placed in a temporary location. If you do a backup now, you should find the file much smaller and both backup/exit and startup will be much faster.

   (BTW If for some reason the last transaction is missing, you can simply restore you MD backup file.)

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3. 3 Posted by derekkent23 on 31 Dec, 2018 06:06 PM

   

   I am not support staff, just a user.

   Moneydance 2019 is not far off stable release. One of the build revision notes reads
   "added file buffer when saving a backup to improve performance, especially on non-local drive".

   May be this will help.

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4. 4 Posted by mcmnky on 03 Jan, 2019 02:53 AM

   

   Thanks for all who replied. As s©tt touched upon, what I really want is less data that will save (and load) across the LAN quicker. I tried archiving / deleting from the current file old transactions, but as is touched upon in other threads, this did not help.

   So I tried moving the TXN files out of the OUT folder (after upgrading to the latest build of MD 2017.10 build 1706). And now my backup file is 146MB!

   So that didn't help, but I haven't opened and closed since the first time after moving the files.

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5. 5 Posted by mcmnky on 18 Jan, 2019 03:02 AM

   

   Alright, we're cooking now! Not sure what did it, but after opening and closing a bunch of times without backing up (and downloading some new transactions) my backup file is now about 13 MB and backing up MUCH quicker.

   I meant to followup sooner, but was rebuilding/expanding the RAID on my NAS and wanted to minimize using it while that was going on. We access Money Dance from multiple computers so storing data on the NAS is a must, and saving the backup files to same place is very convenient.

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6. System closed this discussion on 19 Apr, 2019 03:10 AM.