Question about starting a new year

Hello I had a question about manager. First of all i realy like the program and it’s perfect for me.

Still i do have a question.
I use manager now for several years and the file is becoming very big like 3 GB.
What i want to do is make a backup of this all and start new with an empty manager (i will take over the numbers from the end of 2019 and put them in to start with in 2020). what i was wondering if how i can make this possible while keeping the same journals. So the "“lay-out” have to stay yhe same only everything needs to be clean for a new period of a couple of years.

Is this possible? so i don’t have to set up evrything once again (like e-mail, standard invoces, different journals, codes etc. etc.)

Hope someone can tell me if this is possible or do i have to start a whole new company and set up evything once again?

THNX

Greetings
Remy

  1. create a backup.
  2. make a copy of the backup.
  3. import the copied backup as a new business.
  4. batch delete all transactions from it.
  5. set the start date and enter the starting balances.

First, have you minimized your data file size? See Reduce data file size | Manager.

Second, does it really matter how big the data file is? Even at 3 GB, your file is insignificant compared to capacities of storage drives manufactured in the past 15 years.

I would guess that most of that size is attachments. You can quickly see what attachments you have and their file sizes from the attachments tab.

I have one supplier who sends PDF invoices of about 3 MB, so now I optimise them to about 200 kB before attaching them in Manager. That alone cut my business file size by about 30%. I’ve been using Manager for more than a year, and after doing the above my business file is 20 MB. If I delete all of my attachments it is 1 MB.

Obviously every business is different and you probably have hundreds of times the data I do, but even 100 × 1 MB is not very much. You could easily order the attachments by date and delete those older than a certain age if you don’t want to delete them all. I would make a backup first and file this somewhere safe, then optimise and use that.

I like to keep mine as small as possible because I do regular online backups, so it saves on data costs and transfer time.

@remyvandemortel, if you are storing attachments, then what you could do is the first three steps as suggested by @sharpdrivetek, then delete from that new business a lot of the earlier attachments.

Let say you have been using Manager for three years, from the new business delete the first year (or more) attachments. This way you still have your accounting records intact and you don’t have to set up everything again.

Furthermore, you still have the “old” business to look up those attachments if needed.

Ok.
THNX for all the answers. but is there a way to delete more than one attachment at a time?
Or do i have to delete the attachments all one by one? (hope i can delete more than one attachment in one time so i don’t have to delete them one by one)

And i did minimize the file size, but it was 1252 MB, and after minimizing it is 1223 MB. so that didn’t make a lot of difference.

I know that 1 GB is not a lot of space, but as said by Graham, i also make backups regularly and the file is keep getting bigger and bigger so it’s taking longer to backup etc.

THNX!

Sorry found how to do this my mistake!!

THNX!

@remyvandemortel, if, in fact, it is attachments that are driving you to a file size bigger than you want to manage, that suggests reconsideration of your document archiving strategy. When developing a storage philosophy, there are always tradeoffs between speed, cost, physical risk, convenience, accessibility, and need for retention.

Perhaps, taking your expressed frustrations into account, using Manager’s attachment capability is not for you. Or perhaps you should consider period backups and purges. You could keep recent attachments in the active version, make an “attachment backup” periodically, then conduct a purge of older attachments to increase speed and shrink file size. That is the big advantage of the new Attachments tab: no need to open individual transactions in order to delete transactions.

As you think about this, remember that a backup will save absolutely everything in the file. So a quarterly or even annual “attachment backup” could solve your problem. Other than those major backups that capture attachments, there is no need to save every backup you make, such as daily or weekly ones older than the most recent “attachment backup.”

THNX.

I made a backup of the complete file and next i deleted all the attachments so the file size is about 2MB instead of 1.2 GB.

So now i will do this every year so i get a one year complete backup with attachments.

THNX for all the answers.