Deleting Old Data

There are two ways to delete old data. One way is when you use Maintenance à Change Year à Next Year on a new year for the first time, and it copies the donors and categories to that new year. When it does that, you have the option to skip copying donors and categories that have no donations for the last 2 years. However, that is not really deleting anything, it is just choosing not to copy it to the next year.

To directly delete old data, use Database à Delete Old Data. This utility will delete all data that is over 2 years old. It must be 2 years older than the latest year for which data has been entered in the program.

The reason for doing this procedure is to keep your database file from growing too large. However, there is no real reason from an efficiency standpoint to do this - the indexing of the database should ensure that all operations are very quick regardless of how many years of data you maintain in the program.

Because there is always the possibility that you will be audited, and that they will want data from more than 2 years back, it is imperative that you make a backup of your data before using this function, and keep that backup copy permanently, so that you can restore it if you need to look things up in the old data after you delete it.

Some users may wish to use this feature in order to make their database file smaller, because it has grown beyond the size that they can backup to a diskette (1.44MB). Unfortunately, this is not the case. Using this feature may even make your database larger initially, although it will mean that there is free space in it which can later be filled up with new data, so your database won't grow again for quite some time.