In what seems a catastrophic bug issue, QuickBooks for Mac update 2006 and 2007 seems to be nuking hard disks. This from the top post in the QB forum:
I opened Quickbooks and it said there’s an update. It started trying to download it automatically but then said it couldn’t because I didn’t have enough disk space, and that I needed 100 bytes for it to download. It’s rubbish because I had at least 2 gigs free. Then Quickbooks started, and I tried finding the update from the menu, and it found it but said I couldn’t download it because I wasn’t on the network, when I was. Then I noticed that all the icons on my desktop had disappeared. I checked, and all my files in my Desktop (there were quite a few) had disappeared.
I opened a Finder window, and Desktop was gone from the left sidebar. I checked my user directory, and Desktop did not exist as a directory anymore. I logged out and logged back in. Logging back in recreated a Desktop directory for me, but it was empty. I restarted, my Desktop was still empty, but it said I had 2 additional gigs of disk space, which is about how much I had in my Desktop. During this entire time, there was nothing in Trash.
I was sure that it must have been an OS X error. Maybe I was too low on disk space and OS X crapped out. I restarted again. This time without starting any other applications, I tried starting Quickbooks again, with about 5.5 gig free, on a fresh restart.
I got the same error again, and my Desktop directory was again deleted.
This is beyond ridiculous. There is NO way that a piece of software like this SHOULD DELETE GIGS WORTH OF DATA OFF MY HARD DRIVE.
This issue should be forwarded to the engineers immediately and I also expect to be contacted with an explanation. There is no way I am going to pay money for the privilege of informing Intuit of their software erasing part of my hard drive.
There’s a stack of reporting around this with Christina Warren leading the charge though it’s not deemed sufficiently important to reach the top of Techmeme. I have my own views on this but suffice to say that QuickBooks is the de facto US standard for offline accounting in small business. That’s many millions of businesses although only a relatively small fraction will likely be affected, assuming you take the stated Mac market share at 5% of the total available universe of businesses using computer based accounting systems.
I was recently referred to Intuit’s community forums as a model of customer interaction. That’s as maybe but I would expect to see a clear and unequivocal fix statement on the company’s main website. The latest update notification refers to a Windows based vulnerability that affects most of Intuit’s products. In other words, an entirely different though equally serious set of problems. In fairness, Intuit has made a prominent posting at its support site.
Even so, I’m not convinced Intuit has roped this problem off in the best manner possible and has certainly left the door open to innumerable lawsuits looking for compensation. In any disaster of this kind, it is never restoring the application that is the problem. It is always the data.
Zoli Erdos correctly points out that:
We’re living in the age of crappy software. QuickBooks is not alone, this incident is just more dramatic than the typical update failures. Even when updates don’t fail, they are becoming a nuisance… Proponents of Cloud computing (On-demand, SaaS) typically point out portability, collaboration as key benefits, but there’s another huge benefit: ease of mind. The web applications I often use (Gmail, the Zoho Productivity Suite, CRM..etc) get updated just as frequently (actually, more) than their desktop counterparts, but I don’t have to worry about these updates: the service provider takes care of them…I dumped the responsibility on the service provider: they work for me.
Any professionals out there with lingering doubts about saas, hosted, on-demand – call it what you will – should need no further convincing. If you really care about your clients, you’re already convinced. It is why I opted for ‘cloud only’ computing more than 2 years ago and have never regretted the decision.
UPDATE: via Cnet – Intuit has issued a statement about the impact. There is a certain passive and somewhat lame quality about the communication suggesting a disconnect between the Intuit communities and the engineers. That’s not good.
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