Why didn’t anyone tell me…

My wandering uses of Quicken started with very early versions on Mac OS, back in the black and white days. Then there was the new age of color macs, and then shortly after was the Windows Revolution, where they discovered that there were greener fields on green screens. Then, suddenly, there was not one product called Quicken. There were two. Quicken for the Mac and Quicken for Windows were only named the same – nothing  else was common. The Mac version had features the Windows version did not and vice versa. I stuck on the Mac version for a long time, and then a few things happened that made me give up on the Mac. One, Macs got a lot more expensive than I could justify on the budget I had. Two, the PC version suddenly got online syncing and the Mac versions were busted. Three, and this is a big one, games came to the PC. I wanted a PC, and I bought a PC, and my mac was not dismissed, but it was not permitted to hold my Quicken data any more. The online sync feature was the dealbreaker, and I had a PC on hand. And that was how it was for another 5 years.

During that 5 years I lost 4 different hard drives, and those were the days when backups were nearly impossible, RAID meant enterprise hardware, and hard drives were not the most reliable. This made me very grumpy. Various methods of backing up were tried, but none ultimately worked very well, and I lost small segments of data, recovered at the cost of time. One of the things most annoying was that every time you re-installed Quicken on a new hard drive, you had to re-register, which forced you to make up yet another new identity for their web site, which you didn’t want to use anyway. Because, of course, you would never reinstall software if you didn’t intend to make up a new identity for yourself.

Then I started working at VMware, and this was an idea I’d had before but was too cheap to try. I moved my Quicken data inside a VM. Hard drives had since come down to the dollar-a-gig range, and I was tired of the risk of leaving my Quicken data just laying on a drive that was vulnerable to being scanned by anything that came by. Around this same time, the MacIntel thing started, and I was able to start using used MacOS machines for Mail.app, which moved the risk of viruses down about 10000%. But I was more after the isolation, backup, and management problems associated with Quicken. Like the little known replacement keyboard driver they use. Like the data files just sitting on your drive waiting to be explored. Like the fragile backup strategy they use. Those wrankle.

So when I started working at VMware, I installed a copy of Windows (legally – my laptop had died) in a VM, installed Quicken, and did the backup and restore as Intuit intended. Then I fixed everything. Then – and here’s the big one – I took a snapshot, and burned the whole thing to a DVD. Now, worst case, I can always get back to that point without question – no registration, no stupidity – just copy files and hit go. And I’ve continued to work this VM exactly this way for a couple years now. I’ve traded 5gb of space for the knowledge that no matter what happens, I can always copy the VM from my MacBook Pro to my PC and boot Quicken in case of disaster.

So, when this morning I was told, “hey look, 2009 is out” and knowing they don’t offer upgrade paths beyond 2 years any more, I decided to take a snapshot and jump in, knowing if all went horribly wrong, I’d just rewind, wait 2 weeks, and try again. That kind of assurance is worth the 5 gb of space in my opinion.