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computing:mac-quicken2007

  • mac-quicken2007
  • Jonathan Haack
  • Haack's Networking
  • netcmnd@jonathanhaack.com

mac-quicken2007


Quicken 2007 is an older 32 bit application that was reluctantly ported to, what was at that time, Apple's newly announced Intel architecture. This means it can run as it was released natively in operating systems from Snow Leopard onward, without the need of Rosetta. Although officially unsupported since 2016, users report that Quicken 2007 runs on every macOS currently released, including Mojave. Unfortunately, however, obtaining the Intel version was only ever released as a $15 upgrade on Quicken's website, and was never released as its own package/installer.

Support Ends, But it Still Works https://www.quicken.com/support/update-quicken-mac-2007-support-policies-may-2016

The “Lion” Upgrade https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/intuit_updates_quicken_mac_2007_for_lion

Fortunately, there are enough copies of the “.app” file in circulation that it can be compressed and copied and pasted to the desired machine. There is one problem, however, High Sierra and Mojave both use APFS by default, which is incompatible with Quicken 2007's backup feature. Thus, in order to retain functionality of all the features, it was essential to perform a High Sierra installation on a machine without APFS.

People Notice Auto Backups Not Working https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7603532/qmac-2007-was-not-able-to-automatically-back-up-your-file

Quicken 2007 High Sierra Support Page https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7601228/is-quicken-for-mac-2007-qm2007-compatible-with-high-sierra-macos-10-13

Quicken 2007 Mojave Support Page https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7745874/is-quicken-for-mac-2007-qm2007-compatible-with-mojave-macos-10-14

It should be noted that many of these folks just accepted that there was no alternative to getting backups working because of the “spinning disks” issue. This is shorthand for a serious issue and workaround, namely, Apple's High Sierra installer will not convert platter-based drives or Fusion Drives to APFS, but will automatically do so on internal SSDs. Officially, Apple does not permit one to disable APFS conversion, but as has been documented at the site, below, there is a rather simple flag to disable in the installer that permits one to disable it:

Bypassing automatic APFS conversion https://www.macobserver.com/tips/quick-tip/bypass-macos-high-sierra-apfs-conversion/

Now that the gameplan was in place, I had to roll back the 2016 mac to regular Sierra with a functioning - and non-APFS - clean installation. This is not as easy as it looks, however, because downloading the Sierra image manually for install media creation requires one to be running High Sierra or earlier on a machine that supports upgrade to Sierra. For that reason, I could not download the file using my older 2008 MacBook, and since I did not want to reformat my production MacBook Pro, I ended up first installing High Sierra using media I created from my newer mac (which Apple does allow), then used the High Sierra install to create the necessary Sierra install media. Here is how to create install media for macOS:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201372

Now that Sierra was installed on the 2016 macOS, with no chance of being APFS formatted at all (since that did not exist then), I inserted my USB High Sierra install media into the 2016 mac while logged into an admin user. I let the installer mount, and then opened a Terminal and ran the command from the macobserver tutorial above, but it failed because I did not accept the license. For that reason, I ran the startosinstall tool first, and and agreed to the license, and then re-ran it with the APFS flag turned off:

/Volumes/Install\ macOS\ High\ Sierra/Install\ macOS\ High\ Sierra.app/Contents/Resources/startosinstall
/Volumes/Install\ macOS\ High\ Sierra/Install\ macOS\ High\ Sierra.app/Contents/Resources/startosinstall --converttoapfs NO

The Terminal provided some verbose output for about five minutes then the machine rebooted and completed installing the OS. Once it completed, the file system was still HFS+ and Quicken 2007 backups ran flawlessly. There was a warning that Quicken 2007 was not optimized, but that's a default warning from Apple for old software. Also, make sure not to install the Quicken Widget as that installer is toll old now and will fail repeatedly if attempted.

oemb1905 2019/05/23 14:57

computing/mac-quicken2007.txt · Last modified: 2019/05/23 21:38 by oemb1905