News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

December 17, 2007

troubleshooting

Warning: QuickBooks hates your Desktop folder; do not run latest update

Posted Dec. 17, ’07, 8:53 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Troubleshooting

QuickBooksA heads up this morning from our friends over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog: users have been reporting an issue with QuickBooks 2006 and 2007 which could result in the deletion of your Desktop folder. It seems that upon launching the program, it will prompt you to download an update which—despite being a meager 100KB—will trigger some sort of “insufficient disk space” warning and promptly wipe your Desktop folder. Thanks, QuickBooks. Thanks a lot.

If you’re either of these affected versions, there are a few things you can do: 1) don’t launch QuickBooks until the issue is resolved. If that’s not workable for you, you can also disable the automatic update feature with the following command-line instruction (if you’re using version 2007, just replace that for 2006). Make sure it’s all on one line, too:

defaults write com.intuit.QuickBooks2006 QBCheckForUpdatesKey NO
You can also lock the Desktop folder (select it in the Finder and choose “Get Info”; there’s a lock checkbox at the bottom of the “General” pane).

It’s not quite certain at this point whether Intuit issued this update or not, but there are plenty of reports on both Apple’s and Intuit’s discussion boards documenting this problem, so be careful. We’ll have more news as it becomes available.

Update: Intuit is still investigating the problem and has created a Knowledge Base document about it. While they claim that those who have not launched the app since the update first hit the tubes on Saturday should be okay, we recommend continuing to exercise caution. If you have been affected, Intuit is looking into data recovery options, but in the meantime, they’ve issued the following recommendation: “turn off your computer and do not use it further. If you continue using your computer or reboot, you may over-write the area on the disk where the deleted data is stored, preventing any recovery efforts from being effective.” Greeeeat. Who needed that computer anyway?


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