Why is there no Cancel button on One Step Update?
Dear Quicken Support:
This request has been made by multiple users - including myself - for years and years. Any time the One Step Update process hangs up, the only way we have to get out of that is to force close the program, which of course is a very ungraceful way of ending the program, and can likely lead to data corruption.
Why has this not been done? It has been requested over, and over, and over, and over again.
I would really like a response from at least a Quicken Support Representative, and preferably a Software Engineer.
It is very concerning to not have this very basic functionality to begin with, let alone to have our requests ignored for so long.
Answers
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I very much agree!! As Quicken software becomes "more refined", it has been having more issues. One Step Updates are taking 20x as long to update vs older versions.
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If you had download problems yesterday, the problem appears to continue today, due to an issue with the service provider. See
If your One Step Update "hangs", please be patient. It will time out and finish after about 30 minutes, without you having to kill Quicken.
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I am aware of the issues. With all due respect, this is 1) a ludicrous request, and 2) doesn't address the underlying issue. I should not have to wait a half hour to do something so simple as to close out my program without running the risk of data corruption. And the download issue is not limited to this major issue over the last two days. I run into download issues at least once a month.
I understand and even expect occasional problems. Nothing is perfect, and I don't demand perfection from anything or anyone. That is not my complaint.
My complaint is that there needs to be a way to gracefully terminate the One Step Update process when said problems occur. This is a reasonable request both from a User Experience standpoint as well as a programming standpoint.
And if there is a good reason as to why this is not possible, it would be great of Quicken to explain it rather than just let the entire user base feel as if they are being ignored.
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Hello @schick79,
While the option to cancel One Step Update is not currently offered, I'd like to refer you to this active Idea post regarding this topic instead which is currently marked as Planned for future implementation. If you would like to be notified of updates on this feature as they become available, you can go ahead and bookmark the thread by clicking the bookmark icon on the top-right corner.
Our Development and Product teams frequently use our idea posts in order to improve Quicken and implement new features requested by customers.
Thank you!!
-Quicken Anja
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There are posts in that thread from July 2018 - over five years ago! How has this not been addressed yet? I went ahead and commented in that thread, but with all due respect one tends to feel like such a request is falling on deaf ears when not implemented after 5+ years.
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For what it worth, a cancel has been tried in the past and every time it was quickly removed because of all the problems it cause.
The bottom line is that they have created a very complicated system with many things going on at the same time and have no way to properly cancel all this.
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Yes, as Chris said,
They used to have a non-modal Window which allowed cancelling for OSU years ago BUT they removed it on purpose due to corruption problems caused by it.
I agree it would be nice to have the ability to cancel especially if it seems non-responsive since killing Quicken via CTR-ALT-DEL is much more likely to cause corruption and should really be avoided.
Hopefully, they will find a safe way to enable cancelling the OSU gracefully in the future.
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I also updated that thread, while Vote is closed
"I expect proper transactional support for Quicken DB or data file, it has been over 20 years normal for a financial software to avoid any data corruption.
Making Update window modal also place User in a long wait till Quicken can be used, up to 30 min.
Every online update a must to be transactional and should not block another update or Quicken usage for a User meanwhile.
This is one of key Usability issues that I have had for past 10+ years using Quicken."
Best Regards0 -
@mikek753b said:
"I expect proper transactional support for Quicken DB or data file…"
And that is where you would be wrong. Quicken's database is something like 35 years old, and it is "embedded". This is long before they had transactional support.
Basically, that has been the problem all along that most people don't get. When you build up an infrastructure you can't just change it out whenever you fill like. It would most likely take a total rewrite to fix the fundamental problems, and that just isn't going to happen.
Not only is there the database, I also suspect that Quicken was never written in a manner that they have a good handle on what is happen at any given time. If you look you will see threads talking about all the excessive refreshes of the GUI. This is another indication that Quicken was never written with thoughts how to control things like this in an optimal manner.
When you look at Direct Connect you will find that it works serially, it is pretty clear whatever APIs they are using can't work in parallel. On the other hand, Express Web Connect does work in parallel, but that is mostly due to the fact that the actual processing isn't done in Quicken. It fires off a request to the Quicken Connect Services (Quicken servers) to update and then waits for the results (a very long wait I might add).
In other words, they have been building on a very old system over a very long time, with different people working on it, with different levels of expertise, and as such they have a system that no one actually understand completely. Anything they do to the core software is HIGH risk.
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Thanks for the responses. I have used Quicken for over 20 years on a daily basis and I honestly don’t recall ever seeing that cancel button. But, I trust you all that it was there, and I appreciate the backstory as to why it had a very short life. Thanks much.
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I'm not surprised you never saw it. If I remember correctly, they tried it about two times, and in both cases, I don't think it lasted more than a week or two before they sent out an emergency patch.
EDIT in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if one of those that I remember wasn't in beta instead of released to the general public.
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BTW I think there is a misconception here. There is the belief that if they put in the Cancel button that it would be less likely to corrupt your data file than just killing Quicken.
I actually doubt this. Sure, if they understood all the processes that were currently running and shut them down gracefully that would be better. But I don't think they have that kind of "handle" on all that is going on. So, their "internal kill" probably would be no better and if it actual triggered some kind of write it might be worse.
But most likely "no different" than you killing it. If someone waits a reasonable amount of time for Quicken to stop One Step Update then there most likely one basic reason it hung up. It is waiting for something (like the server) that never responses.
As such it isn't really doing anything important, like writing to the disk.
Quicken does seem to be written well enough that it doesn't go for very long in an "inconsistent state". As long as Quicken isn't actively writing to the disk, there isn't much chance of it getting corrupted by killing Quicken.
Frankly, I would worry much more about it "corrupting itself", as in the case like sync to Mobile/Web. And in the old days I'm sure I have caught Quicken corrupting data files when it did the yearly database conversions.
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I know and agree that the Quicken is way outdated infra or framework wise if any.
So I expect this to be reimplemented to get proper transactions support, key word is expect, or wish in this case.
I asked several times about migrating to modern DB from data file, but Quicken PM likely looks from business point of view for ROI, so migrate current product to modern implementation would be costly and comes with high risk due to initial bugs.
As result till this fundamental DB issue is addressed as we will not see much performance improvements IMHO, while opposite new Quicken features to lock more and more data that will slowdown Quicken even more.
Best Regards1 -
@mikek753b If you look at the other threads people are complaining about the price increase for 2024, if Quicken Inc actually went to migrate Quicken Windows to a modern implementation the stick shock would be much higher. And maybe they might get it done 20 or 30 years at the rate they seem to develop at.
We are talking pretty much a total rewrite. Intuit started one of these in 2008 for Quicken Mac, check out the threads of where they are in comparison to even Quicken Mac 2007 features. To be sure they have made some improvements in some areas where it is even better than Quicken Windows, but they have a long way to go before the feature set is even close to finished.
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