"Backing up your Quicken file" window will not close

mjbegay

In the past 2 weeks the "Backing up you Quicken file" will not complete or close. I left it running and it continues to run for hours. My iMac is < 2 yrs old and has 16GB of memory and plenty of hard drive space. I've forced quit and restarted the computer multiple times and no resolve, it still happens. if there is no fix, how do I turn off and do manual backups.
How do I resolve? any answers?

jacobs

You can turn automatic backups off in Quicken Preferences.

But you shouldn't need to. Can you provide some additional information about your set-up? What version of macOS and what version of Quicken? Where is your backup file location (internal hard drive? external drive? cloud drive?).

mjbegay

thanks for the response. my quicken for mac version is 5.17.6 (Build 517.34958.100). and Mac OS 10.15.7 which was updated last night. problem still persists with the new Mac OS version.

mjbegay

One other note, Activity Monitor status. Quicken is red and not responding so I forced a quit after 30 minutes. when Quicken was working, last week, backups after quitting took on 15 seconds.

jacobs

Again I'll ask: where is your backup file location? Is it on your internal hard drive? In Quicken's default location (your User folder > Application Support > Quicken > Backups > Automatic Backups) or have you specified a different location? Have you tried changing the location (temporarily) to see if the results differ? 

What happens if you do File > Save a Backup to initiate a manual backup? Same problem or does it work? 

mjbegay

Automatic backups are in the default location (User folder > Application Support > Quicken > Backups > Automatic Backups). No alternate location has been specified. When a manual backup is done (ext drive) it completes is 3 seconds.

mjbegay

Since the latest MacOS updates, do you think Quicken still has permissions to write to the Application Support folder?

jacobs

mjbegay said:

Since the latest MacOS updates, do you think Quicken still has permissions to write to the Application Support folder?

I would say it should, although I can't confirm because I'm still on Mojave. But lots of applications use that folder for storing data, so I don't think anything should have changed with a minor macOS version update. I've also not seen other Quicken Mac users reporting the same thing.

There are a few things you could do to test further to try to isolate what's going on…

1) Temporarily change the file backup location to somewhere else -- create a folder on your Desktop, for instance -- and see if the backups work quickly or still fail.

2) Create a new Quicken data file (File > New) for testing. Create a dummy account not hooked to any financial institution, enter a transaction, and see what happens when you quit. Does the auto-backup to the default location work?

mjbegay

I entered some new transactions in Quicken. Did a manual backup to ext drive. No issues. I then did File>Quit and got pop up, "Backing up you Quicken file". I let it run for a few minutes. Checked Activity Monitor, Quicken is red and not responding.
Checked System Preferences > Security & Privacy and got this error: "Preferences Error, Could not load Security & Privacy preferences pane. OK button"

Then a error pop up window appeared:
"com.apple.preferences.security.remoteservice quit unexpectedly, Click report to see more detailed information and send a report to Apple. Ignore or Report button options."

Checked Activity Monitor, Quicken is red and still not responding. I sent error report to Apple which does nothing. Forced quit Quicken and pop up, "Backing up you Quicken file" went away.

Clicked OK button on System Preferences > Security & Privacy and got this error: "Preferences Error, Could not load Security & Privacy preferences pane. OK button"

Checked System Preferences > Security & Privacy and still get preferences error.

Went to User Folder > Library > Preferences folder couldn't find "com.apple.preferences.security.remoteservice". Did search on the mac and Library and it could not find the file.

jacobs

I don't understand all of that, but if you cannot load your System Preferences > Security & Privacy pane, you've got some macOS issue going on.

For what it's worth, a Spotlight search for "com.apple.preferences.security.remoteservice" on my Mac comes up empty as well. I also manually looked in both the system Library and User Library Preferences folders and didn't find such a file.

But your message said it quit unexpectedly, so this is a process and not just a preference file. So I launched Activity Monitor and searched for "remote". A few tasks showed up, none related to this. Then I opened System Preferences and selected Security & Privacy. At that moment, this item popped up as a running process:


It goes away when I close Security & Privacy.  As I mentioned above, I'm on Mojave, not Catalina. I've never run into a problem opening Security & Privacy, so I'm afraid I can't offer help on that issue. Are you logged into your Mac using a user that has admin privileges? If so, I suggest you pursue resolving that macOS problem before turning back to Quicken backups. (You could still try the two tests I mentioned above to further clarify what's going on, but I think you've found the underlying macOS problem.)

mjbegay

Interesting results. I rebooted my computer and reset the NVRAM. Security & Privacy now opens. I've started and quit Quicken twice and no back up issues.

I did check Activity Monitor for com.apple.preference.security.remoteservice process and results are the same as yours. it only runs when Security & Privacy is selected.

Since resetting the NVRAM, Safari 14 now opens in a few seconds. Before it would take 30 seconds to load this quicken community page.

I'll log a trouble ticket with Apple. Thank you for your help and asking the right questions to determine the root cause.