Mysterious update without warning has caused data file problems

Mike54

I have been using Quicken for Mac for maybe a couple of years now without any significant issues. When I sat down at my Mac this morning, I noticed Quicken was not running, which is unusual because I never quit the program. It did not appear that my Mac had restarted. When I launched Quicken, I was greeted with a variety of messages saying that it was either checking and/or upgrading my data file. This took a few minutes to complete, and I saw messages about checking split transactions, etc. Nothing like this has ever happened before.

When the program finally launched, I noticed numerous errors throughout my data. Many transfers had suddenly become invalid, with a little red circle with an arrow next to them. Many balances were off and some manually entered investment transactions appear to be missing. Some duplicate transactions appear to have been downloaded. Scheduled transactions that had been entered suddenly appeared as overdue in my register. For some reason, the problems seem to be confined to transactions after mid-October. Nothing before then appears to have been affected.

I looked in the Quicken file back up folder and saw that the most recent back up file was named “BACKUP (Pre-Update)…,” indicating that an update of some sort had taken place. Nothing like this has ever happened before. With all previous updates of the program, I was greeted with a message announcing that an update was available and describing what was included. It was then up to me whether to update or not. Nothing like that happened this time. All I know was that everything was working fine yesterday and then, this morning,the program was not running. When I opened it, it immediately began running this strange data verification procedure on the file.

All I can infer is that, without warning, the program somehow updated and shut down with no notice to me.

I restored the data file from the pre-update back up, but it did the same thing, running the data verification process. So I just spent a couple of hours trying to clean up all of the broken transfers, skipping all the erroneously scheduled transactions, and fixing other errors. It is slowly coming back together, but I still have at least another hour to go. I didn’t have three hours to spare to fix my data!

What happened? Why would the program seemingly update and shut down without warning, only to screw up my data? Has anyone else encountered anything like this? Does anyone know if I rolled the Mac back to yesterday with Time Machine, would it also roll back the version of Quicken? Or would it just roll back the data and leave me with the updated version of Quicken that apparently caused the problems?

jacobs

You can roll back to yesterday if you wish: you just have to restore BOTH the Quicken app in your Applications folder AND your Quicken data file (which, if you have left it in Quicken's default location is in your User Library folder, in Application Support > Quicken > Documents). 

The messages you describe sound normal for the upgrade from version 5.13  or 5.14.0 to 5.14.2; there was a bug in the initial release of 5.14.0 which affected splits, and they added some maintenance routines to checks for and clean up any instances of that bug in your data.

Why was there a download of an update? I've never heard of it just happening spontaneously. But if an update notice comes up, the default option in the dialog box is to download it -- so if you bumped your keyboard or mouse in any way after that dialog came up, it's possible you okayed the download without realizing it. 

As for the update causing broken transfers, that sounds really odd; I can only tell you haven't seen any other reports of such a problem. So it definitely seems worth going back to a backup data file and letting it run the update again to see if the problem recurs. That is, if you restore a copy of your data file only, while leaving the current 5.14.2 app on your computer, the next time you launch Quicken, it will again convert your database to the current 5.14.2 format -- hopefully without the transfers problems this time. If you do that and the transfer problems occur again, you can roll back your data file AND the app to yesterday or the day before, and continue using whatever version you had been using previously; you'll have to not accept the pop-up to upgrade every time you launch Quicken -- and then proceed to dig into diagnosing what was wrong with your transfers. It's impossible to know without further work whether the problem you encountered is (a) a fluke, (b) a bug in versions 5.14.2, or (c) a problem of some sort in your data file.

jacobs

You can roll back to yesterday if you wish: you just have to restore BOTH the Quicken app in your Applications folder AND your Quicken data file (which, if you have left it in Quicken's default location is in your User Library folder, in Application Support > Quicken > Documents). 

The messages you describe sound normal for the upgrade from version 5.13  or 5.14.0 to 5.14.2; there was a bug in the initial release of 5.14.0 which affected splits, and they added some maintenance routines to checks for and clean up any instances of that bug in your data.

Why was there a download of an update? I've never heard of it just happening spontaneously. But if an update notice comes up, the default option in the dialog box is to download it -- so if you bumped your keyboard or mouse in any way after that dialog came up, it's possible you okayed the download without realizing it. 

As for the update causing broken transfers, that sounds really odd; I can only tell you haven't seen any other reports of such a problem. So it definitely seems worth going back to a backup data file and letting it run the update again to see if the problem recurs. That is, if you restore a copy of your data file only, while leaving the current 5.14.2 app on your computer, the next time you launch Quicken, it will again convert your database to the current 5.14.2 format -- hopefully without the transfers problems this time. If you do that and the transfer problems occur again, you can roll back your data file AND the app to yesterday or the day before, and continue using whatever version you had been using previously; you'll have to not accept the pop-up to upgrade every time you launch Quicken -- and then proceed to dig into diagnosing what was wrong with your transfers. It's impossible to know without further work whether the problem you encountered is (a) a fluke, (b) a bug in versions 5.14.2, or (c) a problem of some sort in your data file.

Mike54

Thank you for your thorough and helpful answer! I ultimately decided to spend several hours manually repairing the damage done to the data file. I’ve had to fix transfers, re-enter some transactions I had entered manually and that disappeared after the “update,” and live without some manually entered security prices. All the damage was confined to the period from October to the present; prior data was not damaged. In two years of using Quicken for the Mac, I had absolutely zero issues until this bizarre situation. Hopefully, it won’t happen again.