Can't Remove Old Financial Statements

I'm in the occasional practice of removing our old financial statements to keep the MLS backup size/time to a minimum. However, the past year or so of statements do not offer the "remove" option.

Is this normal?

I'd like to remove all but the last couple of months worth of statements but MLS won't let me.

ckmcdonald wrote:I'm in the occasional practice of removing our old financial statements to keep the MLS backup size/time to a minimum. However, the past year or so of statements do not offer the "remove" option.

Is this normal?

I'd like to remove all but the last couple of months worth of statements but MLS won't let me.

Are you on MLS 3.5 yet? According to reports backup speed is much, much faster in 3.5 so you may not need to worry about this anymore.

No, not on 3.5 yet.

ckmcdonald wrote:I'm in the occasional practice of removing our old financial statements to keep the MLS backup size/time to a minimum. However, the past year or so of statements do not offer the "remove" option.

Is this normal?

This is how MLS has worked since July or so. See a discussion of this very point starting here. There's an indication in this post that it may be a bug that the statements can't be removed, but I haven't seen any recent indications that anyone is working on it.

I thought this was a feature, not a bug, at least for most financial stuff like IROPs. The need is present for MLS to store all financial data for three years for legal reasons. Maybe I'm insane, but I'm pretty sure that was in one of the updates sent out with an earlier version of MLS. Some things can still be deleted, but the actual IROPs at least should not be able to be deleted since they are the trail of expenses.

Anyway, the problem is significantly less now that backup times are drastically improved. As a reference point, our twenty-minute backups (72 MB) are down to about thirty seconds. Still kinda slow for the size, but at least now we're set for a couple of years of the same kind of growth and we're not up against a really bad bug with unbuffered disk writes during backups (which was the original problem).

dajoker wrote:I thought this was a feature, not a bug, at least for most financial stuff like IROPs. The need is present for MLS to store all financial data for three years for legal reasons.

The IROP in MLS may be the only data a unit has for the transaction if they do not print it. But the Unit Financial Statements must be printed for the clerk and the bishop to sign. That signed copy is what is retained to meet the retention requirement. Therefore the electronic copy is no longer needed.

Sorry, must have missed that this only pertained to the month/quarter/whatever-end statements vs. all things under 'Financial Statements' within MLS. Crawling back into my hole now.
AB

dajoker wrote: Crawling back into my hole now.

No need for that. We all occasionally miss the topic mark. I have done this more than once. It is just a reminder that we are imperfect.

Apparently v3.5 doesn't fix the "bug" that we can't remove old financial statements.
Nor did we notice any speedup in the backup time.
Anyone found a way to remove old statements without a "Remove" by them?

ckmcdonald wrote:Nor did we notice any speedup in the backup time.

Ours has gone from a little over three minutes to seven seconds.

ckmcdonald wrote:Anyone found a way to remove old statements without a "Remove" by them?

While we have had discussions in the forum about this, there has been no indication from any church employee that the ability to remove UFS will be forthcoming.

ckmcdonald wrote:Nor did we notice any speedup in the backup time.

Before 3.5, I noticed that backing up to a flash drive was only a bit slower than backing up to the hard drive. Now with 3.5, I find that backing up to the hard drive is dramatically faster than it was before, but backing up to a flash drive is only somewhat faster. So it's much faster (for me at least) to back up to the hard drive and then copy from there to the flash drive.

I didn't specify to what drive or media our backups are made. We have always backed up to the hard drive first and then copy to a flash drive.

jdlessley wrote:Ours has gone from a little over three minutes to seven seconds.

We stayed at about 30 seconds.