Guide
When a .mny file will not open
There are four quite different reasons a .mny file refuses to open, and
they need four different answers. Work through them in this order rather than trying fixes
at random on your only copy.
Before anything else: work on a copy
If this file is the only record of years of accounts, copy it somewhere else now and do everything that follows on the copy. Most of the damage we hear about was done by a well-meant repair attempt on an original, not by the original fault.
1. It is encrypted, and that is normal
If double-clicking does nothing, Access refuses it, or a text editor shows gibberish,
nothing is wrong with your file. Every .mny is an encrypted Jet/MSISAM database
— masked header, scrambled pages. It is meant to look like that.
What you need is something that decrypts it: Money itself, or a tool that reads the format. See how to open a .mny file.
2. It is password-protected
Money 2002 onwards could put a password on the file. If you are prompted and the password you remember is rejected, that is the file working correctly.
An honest word here. Microsoft Money Rescue opens password-protected files with the password you supply — your file, your password. It does no password guessing and no cracking, and neither does any tool we would be willing to recommend. If the password is genuinely lost, we cannot get you in and we would rather tell you that now than take £39 to find out.
3. It is from a version that is not supported
This one catches people out because the file is perfectly healthy. Microsoft Money Rescue reads Money 2001 through Money Plus 2008. Money 2000 is not supported: a Money 2000 file will not open.
If you are not sure which version wrote your file, the free preview will tell you rather than leaving you guessing.
4. It is genuinely damaged
Files that lived on failing drives, half-finished backups or old optical discs can be truncated or have corrupt pages. Some of these can still be partly read; some cannot.
Two things are worth knowing. First, Money Plus Sunset will not help here — it is the same code that already refused the file, so it will refuse it the same way. Second, a tool that reads the raw pages directly can sometimes recover the intact parts of a file that Money itself gives up on, because it is not insisting the whole database be valid before showing you anything.
Microsoft Money Rescue opens even corrupt files read-only, without writing back to them or touching the modification time. Where it cannot read something it says so and stops — it reports what it could not recover rather than inventing numbers. On your finances, that is the only acceptable behaviour.
How to find out which one you have
Rather than guess between the four, run the free preview on your own file. It opens the file read-only and tells you on screen what it found — the accounts, the transaction count, the date range — or says plainly that it could not read it, and why. Either way you learn which of the four problems you actually have, and it costs nothing.
See what is in your file before you pay anything
You can run Microsoft Money Rescue against your own
.mny file and see on screen what it finds — the accounts, how many transactions,
the date range — before deciding whether it is worth £39 to you. Saving that out to
files is what the licence unlocks; looking is free.