Here’s one reason to use an online service to store financial data: no buggy updates to deal with.* Intuit’s December update for 2006 and 2007 versions of QuickBooks Pro on the Mac platform wiped the user’s Desktop folder and anything stored there. The company released a patch, but it didn’t work if you launched QuickBooks while connected to a wireless hotspot, oops. The latest patch, so far as we can tell, simply disables any further updates to the application—on January 3rd the company “began automatically feeding a patch to Mac QuickBooks users that permanently switches off the program’s upgrade mechanism to prevent a repetition of a data disaster.” In the meantime, since they can’t offer a way to fix the deleted Desktop folders, they’re offering rebates to users who buy a copy of the data recovery program Data Rescue II.

Some businesses, however, aren’t so easily mollified.

Three businesses that lost data during the update snafu have filed a lawsuit against Intuit and have asked a federal judge to grant the case class-action status. The firms — Create-A-Card Inc. in New York, AGSJ Inc. in California and Philanthropic Focus LLC in Florida — charged Intuit with reacting slowly to news from users of the buggy update and said that they each had lost irreplaceable data.

“Intuit: Patched Mac QuickBooks still deletes data” [ComputerWorld]
“Update: Intuit patches Mac QuickBooks” [ComputerWorld]
(Thanks to DJ!)
(Image: Getty)

[Re. “no buggy updates”: At least not on the user side—we know that doesn’t guarantee anything…]

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