Opening a manually exported backup in Moneydance 2014

This is an archived document. Please refer to the more recent knowledge base articles on this page

Moneydance 2014 and 2015 offers the ability to manually export a backup to a location of your choosing (external hard drive, thumb drive, etc. The backup is a compressed file, and for data fidelity reasons does not contain data related to syncing with mobile devices (such as iPhones/iPads/etc).

To open this compressed backup file:

1) Rename the backup file so the file extension is .zip

2) Extract/unzip this file (Mac users can do so by double clicking the zip file, Windows users can do so by right clicking the zip file and selecting "Extract All")

3) After unzipping you will see your Moneydance file folder with a name like "MyFileName.moneydance"

4) If you would like to move the location where your data file is stored do so now by moving the entire "MyFileName.moneydance" folder to the desired location

5) Open Moneydance. If you do not see the "Welcome to Moneydance" window go to the Moneydance menu bar, open the "Window" menu, then select "Welcome to Moneydance"

6) Click the "Open Other" button in the lower left hand corner of the "Welcome to Moneydance" Window

7) Navigate to the "MyFileName.moneydance" folder's location, click the folder to select it, then click "Open" to open the file in Moneydance

8) Now you're all set!