Problem with Quicken 2006 and Shared Folders.

Parallels Beta 6. Win XP Pro SP2 all updates. Quicken Home and Business 2006 R4.

With the Quicken Data File residing on a Shared Folder which lives in Mac OSX 10.4.6

When entering new invoices i get the error as seen in the attachment. Then the next time i use quicken all the transaction have been delete that are after october of 2005.

If the data file resides locally within Parallels hard drive this does not happen.

This is defintely repeatable. HUGE PROBLEM!!! I know that the only reason i would buy Parallels is to run this version of Quicken and in browsing different forums this seems to be the same with many other people too..

 

Thanks for report,
This problem seems to be fixed already and will be addressed in the next public version of Parallels Workstation. We will investigate this problem.

 

Alan---I had a similar problem as well. And while I am confident in Parallels will ultimately fix the problem, I am *not* so confident in Quicken's robustness anymore. Therefore, what I have chosen to do is leave my master copy of my Quicken data on the Parallels disk, and use the program MirrorFolder to mirror it over the host-only network to the Mac native disk. That way, Quicken gets the advantage of a more "native" file, and MirrorFolder allows me to keep an up-to-date copy in a place that I can easily back up on a regular basis.

Oh, BTW, I have found that Windows File Sharing over the host-only network is more stable than Parallels shared folders. (That is an understatement, actually---Parallels shared folders crash my Windows install.) Again, Parallels is certainly going to fix this eventually, but for now, that may be your best bet.

Mirrorfolder costs less than $40 and is a small price to pay for peace of mind. You can try it for 30 days free. Google it and you'll find it.

 

just tried again with RC1 and same problem.

 

Alan---out of curiosity I checked Quicken's web site and they recommend against running Quicken over a network or shared drive, because they write data to the file incrementally as it is entered. I'd strongly recommend you consider my solution or some equivalent to it. By doing it that way I'm able to use Quicken without a problem, and back it up using Mac Backup to my .mac account!

 

Well I currently am using the open source Q emulator to run Quicken in Win98 on my macbook pro with the data file residing on iDisk, accessed via a shared folder. No issues at all. While your way might work, it is a pretty extreme half ass work around for something that should just work.

 

Well, if Quicken is to be beleived, it's pretty luck that you're able to work using iDisk

 

Shared folders also crash my Windows Explorer instantly. I've tried setting the share to different folders, deleteing the hidding .parallels file it creates in the share point, etc., but it's no good.

This worked once in beta 6, then starting crashing. Now under RC it still crashes. I presume Parallels is aware of this bug and working on it? Is there any data I can provide to help isolate it?

 

I'm not using Parallels on a Mac yet but have been creating my Windows image in preparation of using it on my Macbook. I will mainly be using this image to use Quicken (the Mac version of Quicken is really, really bad - and the formats are not interchangeable between Mac and Windows).

I currently use Quicken from my Mac via remote desktop to a Vmware Image running on my Linux machine. Here, I utilize shared folders to access my Quicken data files residing my Linux machine. I have tried using Samba to share out this same location, but Quicken has issues with using a network share such as the samba method. Quicken does not, however, have issues with the shared folders. I'm assuming this is because to the OS they just appear as other file locations and not going over a network transport like samba.

The only reason I bring this up is to reiterate the need to have shared folders working properly and implemented correctly. Network file shares don't always cut it for certain applications, like Quicken. I can say for sure that if Parallels does this correctly, I will be a purchaser of Parallels and will stop using Vmware.

Also, syncing the directories seems like too much of a workaround for something that should work properly. I'm also not saying its not Quicken's fault that this doesn't work (hey, look at how bad they screwed up on the Mac version of Quicken), but I doubt they are going to change the way they do things since it has always been this way (and I've been using it this way for a few years).

Brian

 

Brian---are you saying that VMware has a shared folders concept? If so, I wonder how they implement it. It sounds like it feels far more "native" to the OS than Parallels implementation, which seems similar in execution and performance to Samba.

Perhaps you could describe what shared folders looks like in VMware.

 

Yes, Vmware has shared folders and it works fine with Quicken 2006. In order to configure the shared folders from linux you use the Shared Folders option under the vmware image to navigate to the directory you want to share (for instance, /home/quicken) and set a name for the share (quicken). As long as the user who is running vmware has access to this location, the share can then be accessed from inside vmware by navigating to \\.host\Shared Folders. I typically mount this as Z: and access the quicken share by going to Z:\quicken.

 

Great, so it sounds roughly equivalent, in presentation at least, to what Parallels does. How does the performance compare to a SMB share, any idea? From what I can measure, SMB shares are just as fast as Parallels shared folders---implying to me that PSF's have roughly the same overhead, which seems unnecessary.

 

RC2 and quicken shared folder.

still same issue as previous posts happening in RC2. come one guys.. get this together already, then you will have my money.

alan