Allday Consulting's Peachtree and QuickBooks Support Boards

I am trying to condense and archive 4 years in QB Enterprise 5.0. It has been running 16 hours and has been stuck at 30% for 0ver 4 hours now. Do I need to abort and restore my file? Our compete file is 152mb in size.

That's actually a pretty small file (For Enterprise), but i can see why you'd want to Condense in order to avoid slowdown. If you know for sure that you have a Backup from right before you began, go ahead and restore that. Then, do this:

- Go to the computer (server) where the data file is physically located. If QBES is not installed there, COPY the data to your local system and perform these steps there. Working on this where the data is should speed things up, and help avoid problems like network timeouts and delays.

- MAKE sure that you are in single-user mode

- Make a backup of your data

- Run Verify Data and then Rebuild Data. If either of those reports any errors, consider seeking technical support to get those issues resolved (we do offer paid tech support, please call the number in my signature)

- Make sure that any Inactive accounts, Names (customers/vendors/employees/Other names), etc have zero balances. Also, close or delete open PO's/SO's in the years to be "purged" that you know no longer apply to any existing orders. If even one transaction associated with an account or Name cannot be deleted, the account/name will not be removed. Make any currently-active Names/accounts that you want to get rid of Inactive and make sure they have a zero balance as well.

- Set a Closing Date as of the day you want data to be purged thru.

- Then, run your Condense routine in multiple sessions of one or two years at a time (depending upon how much data are in those years). This should help prevent the system from getting overwhelmed. Also, consider checking fewer options, then re-doing the same "years to be purged" and check all of the options you want purged.

- Make a Portable company file (it's an option in the Backup routine) and Restore FROM that Portable file. This will usually crunch down the data a bit further.

- Do another backup-verify-rebuild pass after each archive session

If you prefer, you can also call us for a quote to have us to the Purge for you; all you would have to do is send us your file and we can take care of it over a weekend for you.