How to I stop turbotax 2022 from corrupting all my saved files?

[bbasiaga]

I started a return in 2022 turbo tax on 3/5/23.  I left it for about two weeks, and when I returned and tried to open my saved file it told me it was corrupted.  Then I started a new return, saved it and tried to re open it.  It was corrupted as well.  I have now completed my taxes twice and its all corrupt.  How do I fix this?  Can I somehow save or ressurect the corrupted but completed tax return files?  Widows 10 PC, last update of Turbot tax was on 3/18, and the software says it is the update posted 3/16.  

[fanfare]

Run system disk repair CHKDSK.

@bbasiaga 

[bbasiaga]

The drive itself is fine.  It's just turbo tax that won't open its own files after it saves them.  

[blakeramsey]

I have the same issue. Happened last year too. It's all on turbo tax side of things. No issues with CPU, disk or other anomalies.

[SteamTrain]

@blakeramsey   @bbasiaga 

....hard to know what is going on there...99% of us using the desktop software have no problem of that type.

Look to see if you have a temporary tax file in the directory you saved to. (same name but begins with a squiggle "~")... You might be able to open that and recover the file.

________

Other: NEVER save your file directly to a USB-stick..or an attached USB drive. Those are known to get screwed up.  Don't know if saving to a cloud drive works cleanly or not either,...only work on files that are stored directly on the computer's internal hard drive.  (The other drive types can be used for backups though, just not for direct access ...i.e. don't save or work on the tax files from within the tax software on those alternate drives.)

[fanfare]

Uninstall TUrboTax.

Reinstall it.

in between steps I use  Revo Uninstaller to do a deep clean of all files including registry.

@blakeramsey 

@bbasiaga 

[bbasiaga]

so after some trial and error, it appears to be somehow related to whether the previous years return was imported or not.  After the update, which killed my save file, I could bot import from the .tax file anymore.  So I imported from the pdf.  Each time I imported and saved, even when doing nothing else the save file was corrupt.  I have anout 5 of them now.  So I fi ally just entered everything manually. 

This software has gone shown hill every year the last few years.  It's probably time to try something else. 

Brian

[bbasiaga]

I did think about teinstalling, but there were several posts on here that the same key would not activate it, so people were stuck paying twice for the software.  

Brian

[SteamTrain]

Yeah.....imported PDF files transfer so little data from the original PDF file, that it's really not worth the hassle.

Safer to just start anew.  

Sometimes it helps to backup the prior year .taxyyyy datafile (.tax2021 in this case), using a copy-paste, so that if your original on-disk copy gets screwed up for any reason, you have an untouched copy to use the next year.  It's a good backup practice anyhow.