bdkunst said: Thanks for the help. I did see some strange write error, but it wasn't very clear. I now realize that my external drive was full, however, Quicken never told me that. I certainly should not have zapped any of my data so that I consider a bug in the software.
bdkunst said: Well the bottom line is that if it can't write then it should stop and not delete. I am a Software Engineer and this is definitely a bug.
UPDATED to clearly state what a program with a modern database would do.
When a database is updated and a failure happens there isn't any telling what parts of that database will be left inconsistent/corrupted. And in fact the most likely thing that Quicken did when it encountered the write error is "stop". And that is what resulted in the "delete". In other words if Quicken was in the process of updating the database section that contained the memorized payees, stopping the write could leave the database without links or even corrupted links to that data. Think about it why would Quicken purposely delete anything after a write failure? You weren't in the process of deleting all of your memorized payees were you? So, why would Quicken think it needed to delete your memorized payees after a failure? It wouldn't. Database writes have to complete successfully or else there isn't telling if they are consistent. With a modern database if a failure occurred what a program would do call the database function to rollback the database changes. That would be done by replaying the journal file to reverse the changes that have been made. But Quicken isn't using a modern database. What's more even if it did have such a feature it would most likely still fail. As any write operation to fix the problem would also fail for a full drive. What would have to happen is that the disk space would have to be increased somehow, and the rollback be run manually after that was done. Or recover from a backup. Which is exactly what you should be doing with Quicken. Note that database, say a program like Word handle their data files quite differently. Word most likely writes to a temporary file, and then replaces the old file with the new one in on delete/rename operation. Programs that write to databases write data "in place" (in a different section of the data file). There isn't a second data file.
bdkunst said: Thanks professor. I'm well aware of all of that. No matter how many words you write It is still a bug.
