29Nov 2012 by Shannon Tucker
What Are DB File Fragments and Why Do I Get Them in My QuickBooks File?

What Are DB File Fragments and Why Do I Get Them in My QuickBooks File?

"Stuff" No One Ever Told Me About..., From Our Guest Bloggers
Whenever you press the F2 key in QuickBooks, a window pops up that tells you a lot of things about your company data file. One of the numbers you see is “DB File Fragments”. What’s that? [caption id="attachment_3718" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Image courtesy of nuttakit / https://www.freedigitalphotos.net/"][/caption] DB file fragment is basically a measurement of how much your company file changes. It reflects how much and how often QuickBooks messes with it. This is not something peculiar to QuickBooks files. With any file in Windows, as changes to the file happen on the hard drive, Windows sometimes keeps segments of data together, and sometimes Windows will assign segments of data somewhere else on the drive. That “somewhere else”, in QuickBooks, is a DB file fragment. When you restore a portable copy,…
Read More
14Feb 2012 by Shannon Tucker

How Well Does the New QuickBooks 2012 Condense Feature Work?

From Our Guest Bloggers, QuickBooks Setup & Cleanup
  QuickBooks 2012 introduced a new approach to condensing large QuickBooks data files. How well does the new condense feature work? And how does it compare to the results given by third party data condensing services, like those of AccountingUsers, Inc.? We did some tests to find out. We used the new condense function in QuickBooks 2012 (using either QuickBooks 2012 Premier Accountant Edition, or Enterprise Accountant 12) and recorded the results. We then ‘supercondensed’ those same original files. We tested “apples to apples” for seven separate QBW files. Some files were QuickBooks Pro and some were Enterprise. Results? For 3 of the 7 files we tested, the QuickBooks condense function performed pretty well. Those files were reduced in size by 57%, 58% and 73%. When we supercondensed those same…
Read More
03Mar 2011 by Shannon Tucker

Warning Signs: Is Your QuickBooks File Getting Too Big?

From Our Guest Bloggers, General QuickBooks News, QuickBooks Setup & Cleanup
Have you ever had a dream where you desperately needed to run fast (you’re being chased by Sasquatch, say) but your feet just won’t go? Your feet can only go in slow motion? If some of your QuickBooks reports seem stuck in molasses, or it’s taking a minute or more to save an invoice, that’s about as fun as a bad dream. Performance problems in QuickBooks are one warning sign that your QuickBooks data file is probably getting too big. (How big is too big? We’ll look at that in a minute.) Another warning sign is when you get random errors or crashes in QuickBooks. It doesn’t crash ALL the time, and you can’t reproduce the problem whenever you want (as if you want to!) But QuickBooks sometimes flakes out…
Read More